Michael Sullivan perldude

README for Michael Sullivan

Work

History

I have been working as a software developer since 1985. My first job after college was as hire #1 of a two-person startup. We wrote custom software for businesses running Unix (not Linux--Linus was in high school at this time). Not a lot of work for us but we got by. We did create a system for a nationwide network of boat brokers where they could input different search criteria (length, price, etc.) and get information on boats that matched. Great web app, right? Yeah, except this was 1987. It was great. Unfortunately, it was also ten years ahead of its time.

A few years later I found myself working at Walt Disney Feature Animation (as it was called at the time), helping to make their first digitally-produced (not CGI) movies. It really was the best job ever until it wasn’t. While almost every bit of software I’ve written in my career is (poof!) gone, a hundred years after I’m dead there will be photons from my name in the credits of Beauty and the Beast flying around someone’s living room. That’s pretty cool.

After Disney I rode the original dotcom bubble, working for a number of fun and stupid companies. After the bubble burst, it was a succession of meh jobs: payroll for movies and TV shows, Ticketmaster, Yahoo!, NBC and ABC, I wrote a bulk-faxing system to send out confirmations for airlines and hotels, a printing company, the federal government, and on and on... I have even been a QA engineer and a manager.

All that time it was Unix and Linux. Writing C programs up until the dotcom era, then it was Perl. Every so often I had to write PHP. I have gotten into Go in the last several years (though not on the job...yet). Have been working with relational databases, off-and-on, from the start. I do mainly backend and tools work. You want me far away from front-end development.

Been using agile, mainly scrum, since the aughts. I was even a Certified Scrum Master🧐 for my dev team at a recent job. I've used it enough to know it's not a silver bullet. I also know that it does give teams tools that they can use to build a process that works just fine for them.

Please keep in mind...

I ask that you please give me the benefit of the doubt. I always try to do the right thing so if you feel like I am doing (or saying) the wrong thing, know that my intentions are good and honorable. While good intentions aren't necessarily good excuses, I do respond well to constructive criticism.

If I tell you that I don't understand what you're saying, it's because I actually don't understand what you're saying. I'm not faking or trying to be a jerk. I really don't understand so please, patiently, help me understand.

I have two-hour blocks of bike rides scheduled around lunch time-ish during the week. These are totally flexible so if you need to schedule a meeting over one, it's not a big deal.

Also, I like chocolate.

My meeting style

I tend to keep quiet in meetings. It's not because I'm sleeping (usually). I am happy to let the discussions go where they will, which is easy to do with great people in the meeting. If there is a point that I feel needs to be brought up, I'll bring it up. I want to add to the discussion and not talk for the sake of talking.

Missed opportunities

Photo sharing

I worked on Woodstock.com during Woodstock 99. I thought it would be great if concertgoers could share their photos taken at the festival by uploading them to the site. I wrote the software to do that. After the festival ended, the "Community Gallery" accounted for more than 50% of the site's traffic.

A smarter person would have recognized that as a clue and gone off to start a photo sharing site. Flickr was still four years away at that point.

Local reviews

In early 2001, a co-worker/friend and I were asked by our manager about adding user reviews to Citysearch.com (user reviews, lead by Amazon, were a fairly new thing at that point). The team's senior developer/prima donna didn't want to add them because he was certain they would degrade site responsiveness. We didn't share that opinion so we went ahead and implemented them. User reviews proved to be very popular and didn't slow down the site at all. They even got mentioned by the CEO in the next quarterly earnings call.

A smarter person would have recognized that as a clue and gone off with his friend to start a local user reviews site (especially after we were laid off). Yelp was still three years away at that point.

Faxing

Not exactly a missed opportunity but it's worth noting. As previously mentioned, I worked at a very small startup on my first job after college. The company was named V-Systems but changed their name after I left to VSI. I happened to visit the company a year or so after leaving and got to chatting with my old boss. I mentioned this idea I had for using Unix with fax modems for office faxing. I told him that he can have the idea because I knew I wasn't going to be able to do anything with it (Unix computers and fax modems were expensive back then). The company actually did build on that idea, eventually selling it to Esker and, today, VSI-FAX is still being sold. No regrets. I freely gave the idea away, a product is more than an idea, and nobody became a millionaire with it.

Non-work

My four brothers, one sister, and I grew up in towns around Fresno, California, finally settling in Madera, where my mother and one brother still live.

I have two children, boy/girl twins. My daughter is a child psychologist. She was a much better student than her father was, thank goodness. My son will happily talk your ears off about books, movies, and TV shows.

Both the IBM PC and the Macintosh did not exist when I started at UC Santa Barbara. They did when I finished. UCSB was using BSD Unix (Berkeley also being a UC school) so I have been using the vi(m) editor for a very long time. After school I moved to Southern California, following my then-girlfriend who was going to graduate school at UCLA (and would become wife #1). I lived down there until 2019, when my wife (#2) and I moved back to Madera (my children are still down south). We did that because I was diagnosed with colon cancer and treatment was expected to take a year (which it did). I'm all better now. A little different but all better.

I started doing triathlons in 2009 and, while I have stopped running and swimming, I am now an avid cyclist. I'm too big to be a road racer but I do like taking long rides. I gave touring a try because I had a dream of riding solo across the US. I gave it a try but had to abandon the dream because of the after-effects of cancer.

Wife #2 and I met for the first time at our 30-year high school reunion. We didn't even know of each other before that. We were quite a topic of conversation at our next reunion.

Listening to music and watching movies are two of my favorite activities. There is an actual iPod on my desk connected to speakers. I enjoy different types of music but, deep down, I am quite the metal-head.🤘 I am overrun with music CDs (and am in the process of selling them) and look forward to Bandcamp Fridays each month. I have a lot of iTunes movies because I don't want to be overrun with Blu-rays. And vinyl just sucks.

I enjoy working in the yard and garden and, lately, have taken up electrical work at home. I draw the line at replacing a panel, though. I have gotten pretty handy at everything up to that.

During my first marriage I made all the meals but now I split the chef duties with my wife. We make pretty good meals, if I do say so myself.

Trivia

I’m in the Internet Movie Database
I have pulled someone out of a burning car
The farthest I have ridden my bike is 128 miles
My hair used to be quite a bit longer than it is now
There are >50,000 songs in my iTunes library and most of them were actually bought.
I have attended the Academy Awards (both the regular and the Sci-Tech)
I found a job on the Internet for the first time in 1990.

Technical preferences

Mac
iPhone
vi(m)
Unix/Linux
Perl and Go
MP3 320 VBR
Wikis for institutional knowledge (real wikis like MediaWiki, not fake ones like GitHub wikis...and don't even get me started on Google Docs)

Music

My Ten Stranded-On-An-Island Songs (in playlist order)

Baker Street - Gerry Rafferty
Mowgli's Road - Marina
Good for You - Caterwaul
Dazed and Confused - Led Zeppelin
Paranoid - Black Sabbath
Epitaph - King Crimson
The Ecstasy of Gold - Ennio Morricone
Love Is Blue - Paul Mauriat
Fotheringay - Fairport Convention
Nights in White Satin - The Moody Blues

My Ten Stranded-On-An-Island Albums

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly - Ennio Morricone
The Doors - The Doors
Days of Future Passed - The Moody Blues
What We Did On Our Holidays - Fairport Convention
Paranoid - Black Sabbath
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road - Elton John
Scarlet and Other Stories - All About Eve
Frampton Comes Alive! - Peter Frampton
- There is no better live album.
In the Court of the Crimson King - King Crimson
- "This is, as a matter of fact, not opinion, the single greatest musical achievement ever produced for the priviledged men and women of this planet whom can hear audible noise. BUY IT, IT WILL CHANGE YOUR PITIFUL LIFE AS YOU DARE NOT IMAGINE." - reviewer on Amazon.com in 1998
A Night at the Opera - Queen

The 25 Best Singles of the Rock Era* (in playlist order)

Rock Around the Clock - Bill Haley and His Comets
Jailhouse Rock - Elvis Presley
One Fine Day - The Chiffons
Blue Moon - The Marcels
Papa's Got a Brand New Bag - James Brown
A Hard Day's Night - The Beatles
Satisfaction - The Rolling Stones
You Really Got Me - The Kinks
Born to Be Wild - Steppenwolf
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (single version) - Iron Butterly
We're An American Band - Grand Funk
Long Tall Sally - Little Richard
School's Out - Alice Cooper
Welcome to the Jungle - Guns n' Roses
Paranoid - Black Sabbath
Holiday in Cambodia - Dead Kennedys
War - Edwin Starr
Inner City Blues - Marvin Gaye
Oh Girl - The Chi-Lites
Show and Tell - Al Wilson
The House of the Rising Sun - The Animals
Baker Street - Gerry Rafferty
California Dreamin' - The Mamas and The Papas
Nights in White Satin - The Moody Blues
Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen

* - Don't ask me to make it smaller. That is impossible.

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