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Comment by bitcharmer | Hacker News Reader

What does he do in the BSD space? I always regarded him as Linux tracing/performance god.

I touch it now and then; search for "BSD" on https://www.brendangregg.com.

Netflix has hired more great BSD folk, so I haven't needed to do a lot on it for a while. I do enjoy it though, and it's usually much easier to read and understand the kernel code.

Most recently I've been talking to folk about eBPF on BSD. Maybe I should do a blog post about it (force me to go talk to everyone again and get their updates).

Thank you Brendan. I work in systems performance engineering in finance and always have been your humble and fanatic follower.

I learned a lot from your books, posts and talks and use your tools (mostly bpftrace and flame graphs for the JVM) on daily basis. I can't thank you enough for the wealth of wisdom you shared with us, mortals!

Can I ask how you got into such a role? Is it at a major bank or some kind of consultancy?

I started as a java developer around 20 years ago; in those times it was called enterprise java and at some point I joined a consultancy that had many clients in telco industry. That meant there was a lot of opportunities to get exposure to performance troubleshooting. At first it was only on the JVM level but you quickly realize the virtual machine doesn't run in vacuum an the OS as well as HW are equally important layers of software execution stack.

I devoted a lot of time to learning about systems engineering and modern hardware. When switching jobs it was always with the purpose of getting more and more exposure to performance-focused software engineering.

In my case the last 12 years was was exclusively big banks and one exchange (LMAX, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, HSBC). From what I can tell there's more opportunities to get your hands dirty with perf on the buy side (hedge funds, prop trading shops) but I always got lucky with the big market makers and got involved in amazingly interesting things anyway.

I absolutely love this line of work and wouldn't trade it for anything else but it sometimes costs you some grey hair especially if you're dealing with the very bleeding edge of hardware and kernel/OS level bits (think spending weeks chasing misbehaving icache on a heavily overclocked cpu).

This job is very rewarding but requires real passion and constant learning.

Hmm, do you think eBPF will have less overhead than dtrace?

Before he got his Netflix special, he worked for Sun then Joyent in Solaris/BSD/SmartOS in stuff like ZFS and DTrace.

The Linux stuff was a money-grab, some say he sold out.. :)

I've been clear on HN multiple times that I saw no future in the Solaris/SmartOS ecosystem by 2014, which is one (but not the only) reason I left it. I was right too: https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/solaris.do

Ignore the troll and thank you for all your content Brendan!

Relax it was a joke. You can state your appreciation without disparaging others who didn't follow your direct means of communication.

I thought it was pretty clearly a joke. Maybe a ";)" emoji would have been more explicit.

Ah, it _was_ a joke. I really wasn't sure.

>The Linux stuff was a money-grab

That seems like an odd conclusion to me. If you've got deep expertise in the spaces he does, and the server market moves mostly to Linux, getting involved there seems unavoidable. Lingering on the dying SmartOS ecosystem, even if it was technically better, wouldn't have served anyone well.

Edit: Ah, as mentioned below, perhaps a joke? I'd attributed the smiley face only to the latter part of the sentence.

I think it was a joke.

The odd conclusion to me is how the last line I've post was interpreted as a serious statement.

Didn't the "Before he got his Netflix special.." or the fact Linux is pretty much the only game in town with no sign of even being seriously challenged served as a hint?

Context is hard with just text. Smarter people than me were confused :)

I thought the :) was obvious. So I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Although at one point I thought Brendon not only abandoned solaris but also BSD.

You're joking of course, but it was me who wrote that, and I stand by what I wrote.

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