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by msdrigg 834 days ago
Hmm still clickbaity because you don't know how it happens. Better title:

"This is the story of the most unbelievable demo I've been given in world of open source. You can't make this stuff up.

It was 2005, and I felt like I was in the eye of a hurricane. I was an independent performance consultant and Sun Microsystems had just released DTrace, a tool that could instrument all software. This gave performance analysts like myself X-ray vision. While I was busy writing and publishing advanced performance tools using DTrace (my open source DTraceToolkit and other DTrace tools, aka scripts), I noticed something odd: I was producing more DTrace tools than were coming out of Sun itself. Perhaps there was some internal project that was consuming all their DTrace expertise?

DTraceToolkit v0.96 tools (2006) As I wasn't a Sun Microsystems employee I wasn't privy to Sun's internal projects. However, I was doing training and consulting for Sun, helping their customers with system administration and performance. Sun sometimes invited me to their own customer meetings and other events I might be interested in, as a local expert. I was living in Sydney, Australia.

This time I was told that there was a Very Important Person visiting from the US whom I'd want to meet. I didn't recognize the name, but was told that he was a DTrace expert and developer at Sun, and was on a world tour demonstrating Sun's new DTrace-based product. Ah-hah – this must be the internal project!

But this would be no ordinary project. I'd seen some amazing technologies from Sun, but I'd never seen a developer on a world tour. This was going to be big, and would likely blow away my earlier DTrace work.

The VIP was returning to Sydney for a few days before going to the next Australian city, so we agreed to meet at the Sun Sydney office.

...

1 comments

That's kind of long-winded. Maybe the title should just sum up what happens in the article, in a way that sort of gets your interest and makes you want to read the story.

How about "An Unbelievable Demo"