Feb 1What Adrian Did Next — Part 3 — eBay — 2004 to 2007I’d left Sun (part 2 in this series), and had a few months off over the summer, so (of course) got married to @laurelco, bought a “fixer upper” house in the Los Gatos mountains, and worked on getting it tidied up. From a career point of view, I was looking…Adrian Cockcroft5 min readAdrian Cockcroft5 min read
Jan 29Percentiles don’t work: Analyzing the distribution of response times for web services (Updated with code)Most people have figured out that the average response time for a web service is a very poor estimate of it’s behavior, as responses are usually much faster than the average, but there’s a long tail of much slower responses. The common way to deal with this is to measure…Rstats12 min readRstats12 min read
Jan 20Supercomputing Predictions: Custom CPUs, CXL3.0, and Petalith ArchitecturesThis post started out as a reaction to attending SC22 after about 20 years away from the HPC mainstream. I had a version of this published as a story at InsideHPC on December 1st. In early January a related paper was published by Satoshi Matsuoka et. al. on Myths and…Hpc10 min readHpc10 min read
Dec 19, 2022Adrian’s recipe for gluten and dairy free boozy fruit cakeThis is a synthesis of several recipes that I’ve modified over the years. I usually make a cake for the holidays. Growing up my mother made what she called a Dundee Cake, a round fruit cake with almonds on top. She would make it a month before, and soak brandy…Cooking4 min readCooking4 min read
Aug 9, 2022What Adrian Did Next — Joined OrionX to do some analyst and advisory workI retired from Amazon and full time corporate work at the beginning of June 2022. However I’m signing up to be a long term advisor at a few companies where I already have good connections, and also was introduced to an opportunity to do some consulting advisory work for a…Sun Microsystems3 min readSun Microsystems3 min read
Aug 2, 2022What Adrian Did Next: 2022 Conference AppearancesI gave a talk at Monitorama in Portland Oregon in June, which set out the idea that carbon is just another metric to monitor, and that in a few years most of the monitoring and performance tuning tools are going to be reporting and optimizing for carbon alongside latency, throughput…Dev Ops2 min readDev Ops2 min read
Jun 21, 2022What Adrian Did Next — Part 2 — Sun MicrosystemsI spent six years at Cambridge Consultants, building some interesting systems, managing our Sun workstations and learning a lot, but by then Sun had opened a sales office across the street, and I wanted to find out what they were going to release next, before everyone else. So in 1988…Sun Microsystems12 min readSun Microsystems12 min read
May 23, 2022What Adrian Did Next — Part 1 — Starting OutMy bio starts with this phrase “Adrian Cockcroft has had a long career working at the leading edge of technology, and is fascinated by what happens next.” About every 5–7 years the thing I was working on that was going to happen next matured and went mainstream, and something new…Cambridge Consultants4 min readCambridge Consultants4 min read
May 23, 2022What Adrian Did Next — RetireAfter a long career working at the leading edge of technology, I retire from full time work on June 3rd 2022. I joined Amazon in October 2016, as a VP in AWS Marketing focused on building relationships with customers. I keynoted 20 AWS Summits around the world, presented on technical…Retire2 min readRetire2 min read
Jan 17, 2022Trends and Topics for 2022A year ago I did a talk at re:Invent called Architecture Trends and Topics for 2021, so I thought it was worth seeing how they played out and updating them for the coming year. …Sustainability4 min readSustainability4 min read