AQUA

Today was my last day of nearly three years working for AMD (Advanced Micro Devices). It was a difficult decision, but I decided to work for another company — more about that later.

The AMD building where I worked

For those of you that don’t know, AMD manufactures microprocessers. I have been working on an internal project called “ARMOR” at AMD, which is a document management system that runs in the fabrication plant in Dresden, Germany.

Russ and Art

Russ and me

The system runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and processes tens of requests per second. It runs on a cluster of Linux machines, running a custom application developed in Java.

When a CPU is manufactured, there are hundreds of discrete steps as the chip is built up, layer by layer. These layers include everything from putting metal on, taking metal off, measuring thicknesses and quality, cleaning, polishing and more. Each one of these individual steps is performed by a very expensive machine generically called a ‘Tool.’

Sony and Troy

When a tool needs to do something to a chip, it uses a set of instructions called a ‘Recipe.’ The recipes are varied depending on which step is being performed or the current conditions in the fab. These recipes also change frequently and there are lots of them.

John and Sony

My project, ARMOR, is the recipe management system. It is responsible for making sure that the tool gets the proper recipe for what it is currently doing. It also acts as a backup, versioning system, and approval workflow system for the recipes.

I was lucky enough to work on every layer of the application from the client down to the database and everything in between. I was able to use a wide variety of technologies including Swing, XML, XSLT, MQ, EJB (version 2 and 3) and Lucene.

This is where our cubes were. We called it ‘Death row’

We moved over to the windows instead…

In February of 2006, I traveled to Dresden, Germany to work more closely with the users of the system. It was fantastic to be able to see a part of the world so far from home, and so culturally different. It changes your views to see that a good majority of the world are quite different from most of the people you know. However, there are a lot of things we have in common, too.

A favorite and semi-unknown lunch spot

We have a tradition of going out to lunch. Not just when someone has their last day, but pretty much all the time. It’s hard to keep the old lunch budget under control when there is a daily invitation to join the gang for Thai, Mexican or Sushi. My last day was more than enough excuse to head out to one of our favorite lunch haunts: El Meson. This is a relatively unknown, and fantastic little joint on Burleson Road in south Austin. They have, hands-down, the best Al Pastor tacos I’ve ever had — and I’ve tried a lot. This is a favorite Mexican dish of mine, which consists of pork, cilantro, pinneaple and whatever magical seasonings the chef can dream up.

This guy cooks all the food

Yummy!

Unfortunately, as is sometimes the case, they were OUT OF AL PASTOR TACOS today. Sigh. Well, the good news — nearly everything else is great. I had the Cochinita Pibil — another pork dish — and it was a fine replacement. Over the course of my AMD time, I probably ate at El Meson a good twenty times or so. There’s nothing spectacular about the interior, other than some of the posters for Mexican wrestling movies. It’s pretty much just really good, inexpensive food. Get it, eat it, and head back to wherever you came from.

Have you seen any good Mexican wrestler movies lately?

Things I won’t miss:

• AMD feels like a ‘big company’ to me. Lots of security. Rules against things like accessing personal email while at work or using an instant messenger. Lots of ‘process’ to get anything done. Many layers of management. I can certainly understand the circumstances that create these things, but at the individual worker level, they all slow down productivity to some extent.
• Users were too far removed from developers — both geographically and linguistically. I don’t think we understood the users needs well enough to provide them the ideal solution.
• It’s a long way from my house. In bad traffic, it could take an hour and a half one way. In good traffic, it was still twenty-five minutes (my best time).

Stars flying out of Russ

Things I will miss:

• The people. I got to be good friends with most everyone I worked with. I’ll miss seeing them on a daily basis.
• Java. I’ve worked in this programming language for the last eight years — and it’s certainly a comfortable area, and my new gig is in something else.
• Occasional trips to Germany! What an incredible opportunity!

It was a good three years, and I’m happy to have spent my time there. But now… on to other things!

The AMD gang