It has been almost three months since I said my goodbyes at Joyent, having spent seven years with the company. A lot has changed for me over that time: I moved to San Francisco, made a lot of friends, got married and started a family. I also spent seven years working on cloud computing and object storage infrastructure!

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to be able to attend NodeConf 2013. The event was held at the fantastic Walker Creek Ranch in Marin County. The Ranch certainly knows how to look after conference-goers — an amazing variety of good quality food, beautiful grounds and friendly staff made for a most enjoyable four days.

It is 6am on Tuesday the 25th of June, 2013 — at least, it is in US/Pacific — which means we at Joyent are finally lifting the covers off of our new product: Manta. Manta is a brand new system that spans the twin pillars of Object Storage and Compute to provide a revolutionary new way of operating on data in the cloud.

I recently had need of mail output from a cron job in a zone on my SmartOS server at home. My connection is via Comcast cable, and unfortunately they seem to block outbound SMTP (port 25). As it happens, they have an SMTP relay host that you can use from Comcast IPs, but unfortunately that service requires authentication.

In August of this year I jumped on a plane and moved from Australia to San Francisco to work for Joyent. It’s been busy and exciting, from learning about a new city to finding my stride in a new role. I thought I’d take a moment to talk about a new DTrace feature that I just added to illumos-joyent, the core of our SmartOS operating system!