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.