This covers my 7th blog aligned with my work anniversary, a successor to http://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2018/03/open-platforms-and-21-or.html. I'm now passing the 22 year milestone.
I try to land this blog posting on the anniversary day. Luckily this year I received an email reminding me that I'm already one year into my 3 year sabbatical eligibility. As far as topics go, replying to Juan's https://twitter.com/juanrodpfft/status/1099896998704996352 brought up a couple of milestones in time, namely Intel Achievement Awards (IAA's). Some background on the IAA can be found at https://blogs.intel.com/jobs/2012/05/why-the-intel-achievement-awards-ceremony-was-amazing/#gs.13ww1ppY.
My first of 2 IAA's was delivered in 2004 and read on the Tiano architecture.
Tiano is the code name of what became the Intel Framework Specifications and the EFI Developer Kit (EDK), which has since evolved into the EDKII project and the UEFI Platform Initialization (PI) specifications. Even though this was about 15 years ago, progress in this space is continuing apace, including the open platform work. The last decade and a half was laying the foundations of the host firmware, and the next will be scaling how it's delivered.
To that end, the open Kaby Lake (KBL) platform has a newly added system, namely the Clevo board
https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/devel-MinPlatform/Platform/Intel/ClevoOpenBoardPkg for System76 KBL laptops. This builds upon the infrastructure detailed in https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/blob/devel-MinPlatform/Platform/Intel/MinPlatformPkg/Docs/A_Tour_Beyond_BIOS_Open_Source_IA_Firmware_Platform_Design_Guide_in_EFI_Developer_Kit_II%20-%20V2.pdf.
So this means that I'm still building upon the project recognized by the first IAA, but what about the second one? The award from 2012 was on deploying signed updates across Intel and the industry, building upon the NIST 800-147 standards effort https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-147/final.
In the last 7 years work continues in this space and follows a similar arc, namely standards and scaling an implementation. A scaling of implementations of signed updates can be found in work like https://github.com/tianocore-docs/Docs/raw/master/White_Papers/A_Tour_Beyond_BIOS_Capsule_Update_and_Recovery_in_EDK_II.pdf and additional standards, such as https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-193/final for resiliency. The latter is important because one of the challenges of deploying '147 style updates includes fear of a machine become bricked, or not successfully completing the update.
Awards are an interesting thing. One school of thought is that an award should only be delivered after an idea is delivered to market for several generations, thus ensuring that the originator of the idea carries the ball to the goal line. Without this tracking you end up with possible technologist patterns like a 'pump and dump', namely evangelize an idea and achieve rewards, but move on to the 'next big thing' prior to enabling and scaling the concept, or 'dumping it' on others prior to delivering market success. At the same time, though, technology is often a funnel that starts small with a few pioneering parties at the beginning, or mouth of the funnel, and telescopes to much larger sets of contributors by the time it appears in the market. So if you wait until the end, it's harder to reward smaller classes.
A colleague once suggested a potential solution to this 'pump and dump' risk for senior technologists, namely extend their review cycle from twelve months to a couple of years. The logic being that the annual review cycles encourages 'pump' periodicity of 12 months in order to optimize the remuneration calculus of annual reviews.
I personally don't know if there's a magic bullet other than the have a culture of each individual having the 'business first' mindset of one of the below quotations. Also, perhaps you can get away with a random 'pump and dump', but your personal brand and reputation will ultimately suffer for this type of behavior. The industry is relatively small, and 'trust is earned in droplets but lost in buckets.' A dump or two can lead to spilling that bucket.
Speaking of quotations and beyond those couple of awards milestones, a few other items came to mind during this anniversary posting. These include memory quotes from mostly-former colleagues, such as DM's "If anyone knew true cost of a project, nothing would be funded" or BP's "It has always been this bad. you are just now higher up in the organization to see more." From there we have more valuable life and career advice, such as "Never lie, but don't tell all of the truth" or GC's "Two sisters never got along with - 'Polly' and her sister 'Ticks.'" Another one that helped me empathize with the machine was RH's "Moving higher in management ranks means making successively more impactful decisions with diminishing amounts of information."
In addition to the quotations I can source, the next ones are ones I find myself dispensing that I cannot recall if they originated from a party inside or outside, including "Prioritize your work with business first, team second, career third, "Be kind to people because you don't know what crisis they have going on personally," and finally "Your career is like archery of Zen - the harder you focus on the target of just 'success' the more difficult it will be to achieve."
OK. Awards and quotations. That's enough for noting the passing of 264 months.
I try to land this blog posting on the anniversary day. Luckily this year I received an email reminding me that I'm already one year into my 3 year sabbatical eligibility. As far as topics go, replying to Juan's https://twitter.com/juanrodpfft/status/1099896998704996352 brought up a couple of milestones in time, namely Intel Achievement Awards (IAA's). Some background on the IAA can be found at https://blogs.intel.com/jobs/2012/05/why-the-intel-achievement-awards-ceremony-was-amazing/#gs.13ww1ppY.
My first of 2 IAA's was delivered in 2004 and read on the Tiano architecture.
Tiano is the code name of what became the Intel Framework Specifications and the EFI Developer Kit (EDK), which has since evolved into the EDKII project and the UEFI Platform Initialization (PI) specifications. Even though this was about 15 years ago, progress in this space is continuing apace, including the open platform work. The last decade and a half was laying the foundations of the host firmware, and the next will be scaling how it's delivered.
To that end, the open Kaby Lake (KBL) platform has a newly added system, namely the Clevo board
https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/devel-MinPlatform/Platform/Intel/ClevoOpenBoardPkg for System76 KBL laptops. This builds upon the infrastructure detailed in https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/blob/devel-MinPlatform/Platform/Intel/MinPlatformPkg/Docs/A_Tour_Beyond_BIOS_Open_Source_IA_Firmware_Platform_Design_Guide_in_EFI_Developer_Kit_II%20-%20V2.pdf.
So this means that I'm still building upon the project recognized by the first IAA, but what about the second one? The award from 2012 was on deploying signed updates across Intel and the industry, building upon the NIST 800-147 standards effort https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-147/final.
In the last 7 years work continues in this space and follows a similar arc, namely standards and scaling an implementation. A scaling of implementations of signed updates can be found in work like https://github.com/tianocore-docs/Docs/raw/master/White_Papers/A_Tour_Beyond_BIOS_Capsule_Update_and_Recovery_in_EDK_II.pdf and additional standards, such as https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-193/final for resiliency. The latter is important because one of the challenges of deploying '147 style updates includes fear of a machine become bricked, or not successfully completing the update.
Awards are an interesting thing. One school of thought is that an award should only be delivered after an idea is delivered to market for several generations, thus ensuring that the originator of the idea carries the ball to the goal line. Without this tracking you end up with possible technologist patterns like a 'pump and dump', namely evangelize an idea and achieve rewards, but move on to the 'next big thing' prior to enabling and scaling the concept, or 'dumping it' on others prior to delivering market success. At the same time, though, technology is often a funnel that starts small with a few pioneering parties at the beginning, or mouth of the funnel, and telescopes to much larger sets of contributors by the time it appears in the market. So if you wait until the end, it's harder to reward smaller classes.
A colleague once suggested a potential solution to this 'pump and dump' risk for senior technologists, namely extend their review cycle from twelve months to a couple of years. The logic being that the annual review cycles encourages 'pump' periodicity of 12 months in order to optimize the remuneration calculus of annual reviews.
I personally don't know if there's a magic bullet other than the have a culture of each individual having the 'business first' mindset of one of the below quotations. Also, perhaps you can get away with a random 'pump and dump', but your personal brand and reputation will ultimately suffer for this type of behavior. The industry is relatively small, and 'trust is earned in droplets but lost in buckets.' A dump or two can lead to spilling that bucket.
Speaking of quotations and beyond those couple of awards milestones, a few other items came to mind during this anniversary posting. These include memory quotes from mostly-former colleagues, such as DM's "If anyone knew true cost of a project, nothing would be funded" or BP's "It has always been this bad. you are just now higher up in the organization to see more." From there we have more valuable life and career advice, such as "Never lie, but don't tell all of the truth" or GC's "Two sisters never got along with - 'Polly' and her sister 'Ticks.'" Another one that helped me empathize with the machine was RH's "Moving higher in management ranks means making successively more impactful decisions with diminishing amounts of information."
In addition to the quotations I can source, the next ones are ones I find myself dispensing that I cannot recall if they originated from a party inside or outside, including "Prioritize your work with business first, team second, career third, "Be kind to people because you don't know what crisis they have going on personally," and finally "Your career is like archery of Zen - the harder you focus on the target of just 'success' the more difficult it will be to achieve."
OK. Awards and quotations. That's enough for noting the passing of 264 months.
