8am First thing I had in the morning was a vendor webinar—it’s where a company is delivering technical information. The field I’m studying, unstructured data, is developing really quickly right now.
10am I pulled in another consultant to talk about ways to improve the performance in the database administration for a credit union.
11am I had a conference call with that client and tried to determine where, in the stack of things between their website and their database, the problem might be. It’s “managed services,” which basically means we run their system for them. We babysit it for them.
11:30am I’m also learning a new programming language from IBM right now, so I spent some more time with that Streams stuff.
Noon I really like being in Redmond, because I can walk to different places for lunch. The office culture is very fun; there’s a lot of laughter. I’m also a photographer—I do photography for the Rat City Roller Girls, so people are always coming up to me to ask about that. We’ve all been to some bouts together.
2pm I had a conference call with Mark Kettering, who is our CEO, and a potential customer—a health care company. I consider myself extremely technical; they pull in other people to do business stuff, because I tend to talk techie.
2:45pm Coming out of that call, I thought, I need to go back to that technology that we were just talking about marrying together, and I wanted to make sure I could do it on my computer. I like to see what I’m doing, so I know I’m not going into a suicide mission.
3pm I’m on what is called the Luminary Council. We have monthly meeting with David Overcash, the CTO, to talk about the schedule for writing white papers; a white paper is our position paper on
a topic. Right now I’m writing a white paper on streaming data and unstructured data. It’s partially because we want to be seen as a thought leader in particular topic areas, and because these are questions we get asked by our clients all the time.
4pm At this point, I’m just back to my IBM language.
4:30pm My day usually ends around 4:30 or 5, I’m usually out of there, but I’m also one of those people who is never really offline. I’ll work late late late. But it’s not with any sense of pain or struggle!
Published: January 2013
Published in the Best Places to Work 2013 issue of Seattle Met.
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