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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Speaker: Mr. Clay McClure, Member of the Technical Staff, Cisco Meraki
Seminar Title: Becoming a Software Engineer: Bit by Bit
Abstract:
Clay candidly recounts the decisions and opportunities that have shaped his career—for better or worse—as he grew from technician to operations engineer to software engineer. Along the way, Clay shares some stories from the engineering trenches: reverse engineering commercial software to work around production outages, redesigning an inefficient algorithm to save an overloaded NFS server, and three weeks of debugging effort that exposed a one-bit error.
Speaker Bio:
Clay grew up in Atlanta, where he taught himself to program on his high school’s Apple IIs. College didn’t go as planned: he spent more time tinkering with Linux than he spent in class, which led to the premature end of his university stint and to the beginning of his career in information technology. Equipped with practical skills and an insatiable curiosity, he has advanced by degrees from datacenter technician at Sprint PCS to operations engineer at Twitter to software engineer at Meraki, a division of Cisco, where he develops firmware and Linux device drivers for their cloud-managed Ethernet switches.
Clay eventually did complete his baccalaureate—scratching an intellectual itch—earning a B.S. in Applied Biology from Georgia Tech in 2004. He is now slowly working through the university’s new OMS CS program.
He spends his free time hiking with his partner Kenney and their very spoiled Shiba Inu.
