Some weeks ago I've resigned from Sun Microsystems, where I worked as a MySQL Telecom Sales Engineer. Beginning July 13th I will take on a new role in the MySQL ecosystem, as "Project Manager and COO" for Monty Program Ab.

Since it can be argued I'm moving to a competitor, and I was working in a customer facing role, upon resigning I had to immediately return my computer, phone, etc to Sun, and my login accounts, including email, were terminated. I've gotten some comments about this (like: "Is there no trust in the world anymore?" and "How can you treat anyone like that?") and I cannot stress this enough: This is normal, I expected it, indeed brought it to my managers attention myself. If nothing else, think of it this way: This precaution also protects me from any misunderstandings and/or false accusations. Besides, starting your vacation by returning your laptop and removing your email account isn't the worst thing to happen to you - try it, you'll love it :-)

This had in any case the side effect that I was not able to honor a long standing tradition of sending a goodbye and thank you note to a certain internal mailing list, because I cannot do that from my private email. (Also asking others to forward a mail proved to be problematic/sensitive in many ways.)

Hence, I'm posting the email I wrote here instead, so that both my former collagues and other MySQL community members can read it alike:

I've been enjoying a nice vacation - the Sun is shining, so to speak :-). But a couple of days I've enjoyed upgrading www.openlife.cc to a newer drupal version, and also adding some much delayed blogging and Web2.0 enhancments.

Notes about the upgrade process (Drupal 4.7 to 6)

I had never upgraded openlife.cc, so I had to go through 2 major version upgrades. To do this, I created a staging site on my laptop so I could spend several days fixing things that would and did break when upgrading.

As someone may have noticed, I recently wrote a trilogy on how to dive into the MySQL Cluster source code. Unfortunately my overtures towards the MySQL Cluster source code ended up being only a look-but-don't-touch affair, as I failed to actually get to touch her internals with my text editor. Even so, in this post I'd like to tell about the background to my love affair with this beauty, by relating to some benchmarks I've been working on together with my customers.

Oh, and I'd like to apologize already, that I cannot mention where these benchmarks were done, what the schema looked like and the exact numbers. If you want that kind of real benchmarks, you should read Mikael's blog, or watch the slides from this webinar. (Then compare those results to BigDBAHead's SSD RAID magic with InnoDB, both are the same DBT2 benchmark.)

"Rick Falkvinge: Today is a good day for epic winnage.11 hours ago" (Facebook status of the Chairman of Swedish Pirate Party.)

The Swedish Pirate Party (the first of the many national Pirate Parties popping up) wins it's first seat (bordering on two, some votes still left to count) in the European Parliament tonight, with 7+ %. In percentages they drive right past 3 long time established parties from the Swedish national parliament.

This is a historical moment in the turns of copyright and even civil liberties movements. I've personally for years supported the EFFish approach (and member of the Finnish equivalent EFFI) of lobbying all political parties with rational arguments about how good copyright, patents and civil liberties legislation will benefit the economy and society in general. Maybe we have achieved something there, who knows how the world would look like without the EFF. I'm still a supporter of the basic principle of copyright, after all, Open Source licenses like the GPL actually rely on it.

(Continued from part II where I tried to fix a bug and found out that the affected part of the code had been rewritten, so the bug didn't exist anymore.)

Magnus gives a helpful hint...

This is part II of my efforts to prove myself that I can do programming. In part one I successfully created a MySQL Cluster branch for myself and compiled it.

Let's go to the public MySQL bug database and see if there are any trivial MySQL Cluster bugs I could sharpen my teeth on. Heh, sure enough #32658 looks simple enough. There is a typo in an output string - so I could fix that without even doing any C++ code! (Funnily, a MySQL internal comment to the bug says something about it being embarrassing. Guess it is a good bug for me then, as patching over embarrasments is what Sales Engineers do routinely :-)

Let me see...

My collagues Anders and even Ivan sometimes blog about the grandeur of being a Sales Engineer. And I agree, it is a great job, probably the best I ever had, so far. But let me share a secret: It's not as technical as you'd think. Sure, they call me a "pre-sales consultant" alright, but I would be ashamed of comparing my own work with those of the real consultants. I sometimes jokingly say that the most amazing technical things in my job are airplanes (they fly in the air!) and how to make a nice slideshow. (OpenOffice Impress sucks btw, and I always envy my OS X + Keynote using friends on this one point.) What I mean is, I mostly meet with customers and talk about the technical stuff, and they think I know what I'm talking about.

I have to confess I'm kind of a wannabe hacker. I think of myself as a developer, yet in practice I always end up being a customer facing person like a Sales Engineer, a Trainer or basically anything where you do more talking than coding. But there is this tiny little Drupal module, footnotes, that I'm actually the proud maintainer of for several years now.