Mike J mikejfromva

A retrospective on my work as a performance engineer at Sun Microsystems — two Supercomputing 2002 papers I gathered data for, the NUMA-and-MPI hardware landscape of the era, the UltraSPARC processors measured against the 6502 of my childhood and the CPUs of today, why the CISC-versus-RISC mental model is long past its expiration date, Tanenbaum’s register-less stack machine, and how a memcpy change shipped in Solaris.

A retrospective on practicing for software engineering coding interviews in 2019 — a little history, some opinions on remote work and prep materials, and a tour of every puzzle in my Cracking-the-Coding-Interview-in-Java repository.

A retrospective on building control software for Jefferson Lab’s 12 GeV CEBAF particle accelerator — the design of the Insertables System, debugging hardware by listening for actuator sounds at the beamline, and missing the ICALEPCS conference due to the federal government shutdown.

An introduction to the blog and its author — a software engineer with thirty years of experience across Jefferson Lab, Sun Microsystems, Amazon, and GEICO, writing about programming languages, cryptography, general computing, and computer architecture.