On a long and lonesome highway... Err, nevermind.
Anyway, after nearly 12 and a half years, Friday 11 May 2018 will be my last day at ARM.I'm not going very far - after a short break I will be joining Linaro as a full time employee on 21 May.
I will keep my roles in LEG and TianoCore.
I joined ARM back in December 2005 to work in Support ( cough, sorry, "applications engineering") for the Embedded Software series of products - which mainly meant TrustZone Software and a little bit of the software components required to make use of the Jazelle DBX (Direct Bytecode eXecution or Dogs BolloX, depending on context) extensions.
As is traditional, the job quickly turned into something quite different, and I spent the next few years supporting development boards and writing and delivering ARM software training. Both with a particular focus on multicore, following the release of the ARM11MPCore and Cortex-A9. I also spent a while in the compilation tools support team. It's impossible to overstate what an amazing time this was for learning. New things. All the time. Solving real problems for real people.
Then followed a short period (9 months) in the TechPubs group, where I worked on standalone documentation to help fill the gaps between the architecture specification and what a programmer is trying to find out. But at this point I had somewhat recovered from my startup years and was itching to get back to development.
I found a role advertised looking for someone to work on multicore software enablement. This sounded like fun, and I ended up getting the job. That was the last time I changed roles in ARM, but (as is traditional) the role itself kept changing. After a period including SWP emulation, Open MPI and Android, I ended up first beingand then leading the original ARM server software project. Meanwhile Linaro was created, and after identifying that the IP paranoia overhead of running the server software project in-house was prohibitive, I first started working unofficially with the not-yet-announced Linaro Enterprise Group from around Q2 2012, and then became a full-time assignee into LEG from 1 January 2013.
I will look back at my time at ARM with fondness, and am making this move because I believe it will actually enable me to be more useful to the ARM ecosystem.
So long, and thanks for all the chips.