The phrase “Resource Utilization” has so many meanings in my life currently, that I have no idea where to start.
At Workday, I (relatively) recently got a new manager, Charlie Boyle. One of his strengths is definitely resource utlization. Every manager has their own style and no style is right or wrong. However, Charlie has brought some great plans to the team. He’s brought on some processes and tools that make our lives as developers more productive. I don’t think we as a team work any less harder, but we’re definitely working a lot smarter due to the resource management.
My Silicon Valley Flex User Group (silvafug) is sorting being revamped as I write this. At our most recent meeting, several of us got together to discuss how to better the user group in a variety of ways. After Wednesday’s meeting, we’ll likely be officially announcing the launch of Silvafug South (and by default, Silvafug North). There are a lot of great people in the user group with great ideas on how to make it better for everyone. I look forward to working with them.
360Conferences is looking into better resource utilization as well. We’ve worked hard this past year and a half to get in the black, money-wise. I think to get to the next level, we’ll need to work smarter. This means working with others in a variety of ways: having people help us with shows (360|Flex and the new Camps) and helping others with their shows (offering advice, 360|MAX, and possibly running a show for a yet-unnamed company).
Resource Utilization also has been a recurring theme for me in computer hardware. I waited 24-hours in line for my PlayStation 3 on launch day. I got it not to game, but to get my hands on a cell processor. My new Mac Pro is a dual Quad-Core machine. Both machines have 8 cores, but programming for them will be vastly different syntactically. However, the same basic multithreading concepts should work across both machines. Figuring out how to program in a way to optimally utilize all cores is VERY interesting to me.
The last one leads up to my life and my own internal resource utilization. I have so many interests and they all seem to point to one thing: Video Games. I think games will be the most mainstream application group to fully utilize these new multi-core machines. To be in a position to ride that wave would be very fun. I know nothing on game making or multi-core programming. However, there’s no time better than now to learn.
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