Like many colleagues, I retired from Intel Corporation yesterday, after collaborating for 25 years in France and Oregon. Yeah! I will spare you the Oscar ceremony style and a badge picture; there are many of these on LinkedIn. You know me: I am not conventional and like humor. So, here it is.

I remember the moments when, as an engineer, I worked on challenging problems. I liked those. It put me into the zone, thinking about unorthodox ways to solve them. During the day, evening, and sometimes, I am sure, in dreams. I loved waking up early in the morning with new ideas and options to try. What if… Then, I implemented them and fought with the hardware, the operating systems, and the frameworks to make them work. Work efficiently and with the utmost self-imposed mandate not to harm our end users. For example, when leading our field telemetry initiatives, gathering anonymous use data from millions of systems worldwide, I took pride in minimizing the number of CPU cycles and memory used to collect a single data byte. I held myself accountable. I loved it! I didn’t even consider it to be work!

It turned out that every time I found myself in the zone, it was in a lab. A lab with a door, sometimes a window, and a lot of noisy computers. Because I value humor, I cannot resist sharing the pictures below. I took them in one of these labs and labeled them, “I was there!” Like the cup of coffee on the post’s illustration*, I can say – and prove – that indeed I was there 😉. If you look even closer, you may see that that day, I even left my blood there.

On a more serious note, and to close this milestone post, let me say that out of these 25 incredible years at Intel, I will never forget my friends and colleagues. I will forever cherish our time spent together in the tranches, the fun, the pains, in other words, our lives. Thank you! Now, my next chapter is entirely dedicated to learning.

* I don’t know to whom I should attribute the illustration, but thank you for making my day!

Pin