For this edition of my Digital Influencer series I interviewed Gene Kim, one of the best known and respected thought leaders in the DevOps world. Coauthor of the bestselling The Phoenix Project and founder of security vendor Tripwire, Kim is unquestionably a digital influencer.
As with most of the digital influencers I’ve interviewed, his story begins with remarkable precocity. In 1987, at the age of 16, he participated in his high school science fair. His topic: cyclic redundancy checks, an approach to checking for errors in code and corrupted data.
A representative of Prisma Supercomputers saw Kim’s work, and recruited him to work at the hot startup, an early entrant into the supercomputer marketplace that was making its mark by leveraging Sun Microsystems’ new SPARC chip architecture.
Then on November 2, 1988, the Morris Worm hit the nascent Internet, taking down about 10% of the approximately 60,000 Web Servers in existence at that time. Most system administrators with Internet-facing servers were caught up in the frenzy, including those at Prisma.
Kim’s involvement with the Morris Worm made him aware of Gene Spafford, an early information security researcher and professor of computer science at Purdue University. “I wanted to work for Gene Spafford,” Kim recalls – and off to Purdue he went.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2016/06/13/digital-influencer-gene-kim-devops-visionary/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: IT Revolution.
