Mark Verber |
Work: I architect, design, build, and deploy services which are scalable and highly available. I build high performance teams. If you want to know more, ask me for my detailed resume. I am current the director of operations for Metaweb. We are doing some very cool things described in an economist article about metaweb and we are hiring. Previously I was the senior director of architecture at Tellme Networks as well as part of the office of the CTO. I joined Tellme in 1999 and built the initial operations team in addition to co-architecting the service. Before Tellme, I have filled a variety of engineering, operations, and management jobs at Microsoft, WebTV, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center; and The Ohio State University. I have been active in ACM and USENIX (program committees, reader, etc). I have had the privilege of being an industry advisor for the joint UC Berkeley & Stanford ROC and RADS projects, and interacted a bit with the Oasis crew. Check out TIER to see what happens when good systems research meets the developing world. I am interested in all aspects of computer science. I keep a list of software I have found useful for Palm/Treo on my Personal Digital Assistants page. One of these days I will finish Hints for Building and Operating High Quality Services which is an attempt to summarize what I have learned about running production services.
Home: Libby and I were married in 1985. She's my best friend. I strive to love and support her, and to be a good parent to our daughter Helen who is a delight! Throughout my life I have a passion to know the truth and a desire to make a difference in the world. My faith has directed my life's path. We are blessed to live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I seem to spend a lot of time mobilizing people. My wife and I have run Perspectives a number of times. I donate my time and skills to organizations that perform humanitarian service or result in effective development (commercial, missions, NGO, and governmental). I think society can be best judged by how it treats those with the least power.
Hobbies: outdoors, travel, reading, photography and music. I love hiking and find it a wonderful way to remember the importance of beauty, simplicity, and living in the present. A number of years ago I invested some time into building a stereo system. Our family enjoys keeping pets, especially house rabbits.
Learning: I grew up in an academic environment where nearly everyone seemed to have at least one PhD, but where it was also understood that wisdom was more valuable than mere book knowledge. These days my learning come mostly from sage advise from great co-workers, interesting web sites, books, the media, and learning things the hard way through direct experience :-) I think sharing knowledge and wisdom is very important... which can be done on a small scale via mentoring, but often means writing. Alas, I don't enjoy writing, and worse, I am not a particularly good writer. I work hard to get other people to write on topics which I think are important. As a last resort, I will write myself. Most often, what I write starts as an email, a brief outline, or an entry in the verber blog. Over time I add content to transform notes into something that is hopefully useful to others. Papers which are refined enough to be useful to others include:
Pages I plan to finish some day include
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