Superpatterns

I'm currently reading 'Programming Amazon Web Services'

It’s the end of my second week at Huawei, and things are looking good. I’ve done a LOT of reading, getting up to speed on the non-identity parts of cloud computing, and we’ve spent some quality time around the whiteboard. I’ve also booked my first trip to Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen, which will be my first visit to mainland China (I went to a Liberty Alliance plenary meeting in Hong Kong a few years back).

One news item that caught my eye – Matt Bross (formerly BT’s CTO) has joined Huawei. BT has some very smart people, and it looks like Matt is no exception – I’m looking forward to meeting him when he visits the Huawei site in Santa Clara!

Talking of hiring, we’re still recruiting for the ‘virtual data center’ team – see Geoff’s blog entry – so, if you’re into large scale identity/security, storage, or systems and network management, drop me an email at  with your resume, the sooner the better!

I started work this morning at Huawei’s Santa Clara office, specifically in the ‘Virtual Data Center’ team with Geoff Arnold. So far, the best description of what I’ll be doing is in Geoff’s blog entry – Building a Team.

They say that all good things come to an end; today, that’s true for both Superpatterns at blogs.sun.com and my nearly ten year tenure at Sun. It’s certainly been a wild ride, and I’ve enjoyed (amost!) every minute of it! My blog will move to blog.superpat.com (If you’ve been using the FeedBurner feed, there’s no need to make any changes) at some point in the next day or so, and I’ll be starting a new job on Monday.

I’m setting up the new blog right now (thanks to Arun Gupta for his suggestion of WordPress hosting at GoDaddy), and I’ll be blogging on my new gig next week. In the meantime, here’s ‘Leaving Here’ from the mighty Motörhead:

By the way, fellow pedants, it’s ‘Leaving Here’ (with a ‘g’) – the YouTube caption is wrong. Evidence.

OK, Eve, you got me. Here are my five.

1. I’m not really Pat. My legal name is Andrew Patterson. There were four Andrews in my class at school, so we all got nicknames. Mine was Pat, short for Patterson. The others were Fingers, Rico and Chads.
2. My original university application (UCCA, for those of you who were in the UK education system at the time) was for medicine. That didn’t work out – medicine’s gain was computing’s loss. Or something.
3. I have Scottish ancestry (from my parents on back) – I got married in a kilt and occasionally wear it for special occasions.
4. I just got selected for Sun’s SEED mentoring program. I struck the jackpot in that my mentor is a (very well known) Sun Fellow, but I can’t go into any more detail there right now. With my mentor’s permission, I’ll blog about this as it goes along.
5. My guilty pleasure is Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Chocolate. My mother-in-law brings kilograms of CDM when she visits from the UK and it has a special drawer in our fridge. There’s nothing like a couple of squares straight from the fridge with a nice cup of tea

I’ll pass the baton on to Dennis, Takashi, Gerry, Pamela and Chuck. You guys are it!

I realized that the About page here is broken (probably in some upgrade of Roller), so here is some current information about me, your humble author. I’ve written it as an entry in the ‘About Me’ category so I can post updates, you can comment, whatever.

I’m Pat Patterson, a federation architect working on Sun’s OpenSSO, Sun Java System Access Manager and Sun Java System Federation Manager. I’m British – born in England of Scottish parents and grew up in the fair concrete city of Coventry. I’ve been working on internet security with Java since 1997, when I wrote my first ever piece of commercial Java code – an ASN.1 library for decoding X.509 certificates.

So, what do I actually do?

• Much of my time is spent on OpenSSO, particularly the mechanics of opening up what was a proprietary software product to be an open source project.
• I’m driving a sub-project of OpenSSO – ‘Lightbulb‘ – the first fruit of which is a SAML 2.0 service provider implementation in PHP.
• I participate in the Liberty Alliance Project Technical Experts Group (TEG) as a representative of Sun Microsystems.
• I regularly speak at events such as Java One, Liberty Alliance Day and Identity Open Space.
• And finally, maintaining my personality cult blogging.

There is more information about me on my LinkedIn profile.