First blog

I am going to dip my toe in the blog pond. I spend a lot of time reading blogs, but I have always made the excuse of being to busy to blog myself. I have been in the computer industry 30 years. I have had the fortune to work on a lot of interesting projects, played with a lot of interesting technologies, and met a lot of interesting people along the way.

Here are some things I am interested in.

• Large-scale data management. I am a child of the RDBMS era and have used Oracle since 3.0, Sybase since 1.0, and SQL Server since its first release. I have a lot of experience squeezing every drop of performance out of these products. There are lots of large-scale data management issues that interest me, but the current RDBMS products are having increasing difficulty playing in this space.
• Internals. I love to tinker with operating systems internals. Early in my career I spent a lot of time in the Unix kernel, but in the latter part of my career I have spent more time in Windows internals than Unix/Linux. Since .NET was released I have spent as much time as possible learning the .NET framework internals. I never spent any meaningful time learning Java VM internals, not because of any dislike of Java, but just due to lack of time.
• Project recovery. I have spent a significant amount of my career helping to bail out failing projects. Anyone who does this more than once or voluntarily is a warped individual. I get a sense of satisfaction knowing that I found and solved problems that no one else wanted to touch. Project recoveries involve:
  - Identifying and correcting systems lifecycle dysfunction.
  - Diagnosing and solving hard software correctness problems.
  - Diagnosing and solving performance issues.
• High productivity. I enjoy studying tools, processes, and personalities to determine what makes individuals and teams highly productive.
• Computer industry trends. I feel fortunate that my job is also my hobby. I can't imagine ever getting bored with my job. There are thousands of new things to learn every day.
• Chicago Cubs. I have been a Cubs fan almost from the day I knew how to spell baseball. I am used to "waiting until next year". One of these years ...

Kevin Hegg