Adam Leventhal's Blog

Leaving Oracle

I joined the Solaris Kernel Group in 2001 at what turned out to be a remarkable place and time for the industry. More by luck and intuition than by premonition, I found myself surrounded by superlative engineers working on revolutionary technologies that were the products of their own experience and imagination rather than managerial fiat. I feel very lucky to have worked with Bryan and Mike on DTrace; it was amazing that just down the hall our colleagues reinvented the operating system with Zones, ZFS, FMA, SMF and other innovations.

With Solaris 10 behind us, lauded by customers and pundits, I was looking for that next remarkable place and time, and found it with Fishworks. The core dozen or so are some of the finest engineers I could hope to work with, but there were so many who contributed to the success of the 7000 series. From the executives who enabled our fledgling skunkworks in its nascent days, to our Solaris colleagues building fundamental technologies like ZFS, COMSTAR, SMF, networking, I/O, and IPS, and the OpenStorage team who toiled to bring a product to market, educating us without deflating our optimism in the process.

I would not trade the last 9 years for anything. There are many engineers who never experience a single such confluence of talent, organizational will, and success; I'm grateful to my colleagues and to Sun for those two opportunities. Now I'm off to look for my next remarkable place and time beyond the walls of Oracle. My last day will be August 20th, 2010.

Thank you to the many readers of this blog. After six years and 130 posts I'd never think of giving it up. You'll be able to find my new blog at dtrace.org/blogs/ahl (comments to this post are open there); I can't wait to begin chronicling my next endeavors. You can reach me by email here: my initials at alumni dot brown dot edu. I look forward to your continued to comments and emails. Thanks again!