Paul E. McKenney

Cautionary Tales on Implementing the Software That People Want

"Be careful what you wish for. You might get it."

I have been developing software for almost 50 years and supporting myself doing so for more than 45 of those years. Although I do occasionally code up something just for fun, the vast majority of the software that I have written has been requested (and paid for) by others. In other words, I have spent most of my career writing software that other people asked for.

As many have observed, it is hard enough to write software that runs correctly, but even harder to work out the correct software to write. This talk will tell the tale of a few of my attempts to correctly write the correct software.
 
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Biography

Paul E. McKenney has been coding for more than four decades, more than half of that on parallel hardware. Paul is a software engineer at Meta Platforms Inc., where he maintains the RCU implementation within the Linux kernel, where the variety ofworkloads present highly entertaining performance, scalability, real-time response, and energy-efficiency challenges. Prior to that, he did very similar work for IBM's Linux Technology Center, before which he worked on the DYNIX/ptx kernel at Sequent, and prior to that on packet-radio and Internet protocols (but long before it was polite to mention Internet at cocktail parties), system administration, business applications, and real-time systems. His hobbies include what passes for running at his age ("hiking") along with the usual house-wife-and-grown-kids habit.
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