about me

contact

• Email: eric@ericgar.com
• Phone: 646.823.1323
• Web: http://ericgar.com
• XMPP: eric@ericgar.com
• Twitter: minusnine
• GitHub: minusnine

gpg information

pub   4096R/EDF93F67 2010-07-01
      Key fingerprint = 7964 43A2 9880 1FE2 A008  824D DA84 8148 EDF9 3F67
uid                  Enrique Kresla Garrido (Eric) <eric@ericgar.com>
sub   4096R/01462932 2010-07-01

ethos

Most of the problems we have are interesting in that they are questions looking for answers in a system of composed rules. Solving the problem is just a matter of solving at least a subset of the system or adding additional constraints to it.

For me, computers and computation represent an interesting microcosm of the available problem spaces in the universe. This is a system that, to anyone but the materials scientist or electrical engineer, is entirely constructed by humans. We decided to have a given number of registers in the CPU. We decided to limit ourselves to a particular transmission limit on the local network link. We meticulously designed the languages we use to express imperatives to the machines we want to control.

And yet despite these limits, computers seem limitless in the value we derive from them.

The part that interests me about all of this is that the blueprints to the entire computer system are available to solve the problem at hand. If knowing how the memory caches are interconnected helps optimized accesses, that information is available. If we need to know how gcc arranges the stack after optimization, that information is just a git clone away.

This is why I’m such an enthusiast for and advocate of open source software and open standards. The knowledge I’ve amassed over the years is only possible because the source code or protocol specifications for most of the things I’ve worked on is freely available and easily accessible. For those systems that are not open, the systems on which they sit on are, allowing for a black-box inspection.

The distinguishing skill of a systems programmer and administrator is not only being able to know where to obtain the copious amount of information available, is not only being able to quickly learn and understand it, but is not having the fear to delve deep into it in order to extract facts needed for solving the system. This skill is often far more important than the specific knowledge base already accumulated, as the systems programmer and administrator will be able to learn whatever tool necessary to complete the job.

That’s what I do and enjoy: taking apart systems and putting them back together¹ (virtually or otherwise) in order to understand as much as I need to solve the problem I’m given.²

The one downside is that this requires somewhat of a jack-of-all-trades approach to computer systems. I think one day I would like to specialize into being a subject matter expert in a particular subsystem (say, one of the Linux kernel subsystems, high-speed interconnects, or something of that nature). For now, I’m having fun investigating whatever I can and enjoying the fact that I have the liberty to spend time doing it.

biographical

I grew up in a sleepy town in Upstate New York called Rhinebeck, attending 13 years of public school, not getting into trouble, and always doing my homework (and then some). I spent a solid year of my childhood coming back from school and watching two out of three Star Wars movies before starting my homework.³

My father worked at IBM for over 30 years and consequently had copious amounts of computer hardware lying around the house. It was only a matter of time before I started hacking on a bunch of Model Ms.

I had the benefit of spending most of my senior year of high school at Bard College, taking science and math classes at a hugely reduced tuition rate. Being exposed to advanced ideas and creative people was a very formative experience for my passion for computer science and overall.

I attended the engineering undergraduate school at Columbia University where I studied computer science. I was planning on studying applied physics, until I had a much needed existential crisis and decided to follow my intuition and engorged myself in computer science. I under-appreciated having so much time to hack on and investigate new systems; my perspective was at the 1.5-meter level when it should have been at 10,000 meters. Still, it was a super valuable experience.

I attribute my work ethic to having a short career in technical theater, starting in high school and ending in college. I was fortunate to gain a “do everything necessary” attitude to getting the task at hand completed. I transitioned to work for the university’s IT group, working on web applications ranging from employee scheduling to webmail once I knew that computing would be my future.

I’m currently the resident geek in the database administration group of Morgan Stanley. The core IT resources are centralized in the company, so my global team looks after thousands of database clusters with an order of magnitude more databases and many tens of petabytes of storage. It’s a fun job because we’re focused on automating and delegating administration across five commercial relational database systems, as well as solving problems from every aspect of systems computing.

my business card

The front of my business card is a rendering of a Julia Set, composed by iterating the equation z_n+1 = z_n² + c in the complex domain where c is a chosen constant and Z₀ is a randomly chosen value. Some choices for c produce sets of z_n which are continuous in the plane and dense nowhere, producing pretty pictures. Small perturbations of the initial starting values produce wildly different sets, and some selections produce really amazing fractals.

The generator for the image on the card has c = -0.8 + 1.56i, and the image itself is in the public domain and sourced from from Wikipedia.