Passing the baton

Back in the summer of 2001, just a few weeks into my job at InfoWorld, I attended our CTO Forum event. When dinner rolled around, I sat at a random table. Two men already seated introduced themselves: Tim Bray, co-inventor of XML, and Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet. “Wow,” I thought to myself. “Just by chance I’m sitting with two people who have made world-changing contributions to technology.”

Although I was in awe, I had an engaging conversation with Tim and Dan about open source and content management. I knew I was learning from the masters. That’s typical of how my job as InfoWorld CTO has been for the past four-and-a-half years.

I’ve been privileged to meet and spend time with some of the great innovators of our time, but perhaps even more rewarding have been the regular interactions with CTOs out there who are getting the job done without all the write-ups and public attention. You are the true heroes.

Before I pass the baton, I want to say something about the honor and privilege of writing and of being read by you and just how deeply meaningful that has been for me. Growing up back in eastern North Carolina, my family used to make a short drive from my hometown of Greenville to a small community named Pearces for a birthday visit to my grandfather, a tobacco farmer who I never saw wear anything but overalls.

My task on these visits was to read aloud each of the birthday cards that were given to my grandfather. Although he was good with numbers, my grandfather couldn’t read and could only write his name. Every time the words wouldn’t come for my column — and I felt the deadline panic that any weekly columnist knows well — I thought about my grandfather and what an incredible thing it is for the grandson of an illiterate farmer to be a columnist in a respected publication. I reminded myself to enjoy the privilege of writing for you and not take it for granted. It’s been lots of fun, without a doubt, but behind the humor I have tried to inject into my writing, I have always taken the task seriously and approached it with great personal pride.

Now that it’s time for me to move on to other challenges, I’m very pleased to say that a truly exciting column is on its way to fill my spot. It’s called “Off the Record.” Over the years of writing my column, some amazing off-the-record IT horror stories have been whispered to me over drinks and dinner with CTOs — from highly customized, mission critical systems whose source code had been completely lost, to expensive equipment being doused by defective water-based fire suppression systems. Then there’s the story of the system administrator who decided to implement software-based disk mirroring on a key server to provide redundancy, only to wipe the disks in the process and realize there was no backup. Expect these kinds of stories in the new column — with the names changed to protect the innocent, of course.

If you want to share your own stories, send them to offtherecord@infoworld.com. In a world where vendors spin the truth ever more furiously, I sense an urgent need for the IT community to recount real experiences without fear of legal repercussions — and to hear how others are dealing with the complicated, frustrating, rewarding, and often darkly comic world of IT. Enjoy “Off the Record” — and thanks again for your attention these past few years. It’s been an amazing experience.