About Me

My name is Justin, and I live in Melbourne, Australia. I've lived here for nearly 8 years, and it's the place I've found that I can truly call 'home'. The food is awesome, and the climate suits me most of the time. You can get a great coffee anywhere, and there's always something to do.

I'm a pseudo-geek, in that I love technology, Lego, and Monty Python, write software in my spare time, ride a bicycle to work, and generally do lots of geeky things. But I also snowboard, drive a sports car, and have reasonable social skills. Reasonable enough to get me a hot blonde for a Significant Other, whom I love dearly, and who somehow puts up with my occasional outbursts of geekiness.

Lately, I've gotten seriously into Storage, particularly IP based storage, which seems to be the New Hotness. I've always been into automation and operational reporting, and I continue to build tools, systems and processes to help companies make more efficient use of their IT equipment.

More recently, I've started doing management type roles that mean I de-skill in the uber-techo-geek stakes, while learning a lot more about soft skills, managing people and other disciplines like Finance and Accounting; I recently graduated the Company Directors Course from the Australian Institute of Directors, of which I am also a member.

I love being able to help the folks in my team do great stuff, but I still haven't weaned myself away from having the occasionally geekout session with them.

I'm passionate about building great teams, companies, and social units that do things that make the world better than we found it, somehow.

It pains me to discover that companies still struggle with IT after all these years, and that it is an endemic, ongoing problem, worldwide. I advise companies at the CIO and board level about how to make the most of their investments in IT, and how they can best make use of technology as part of their company strategy. There's a lack of IT literate people at board level, so I try to help fix that.

My secret desire is to have software I built referenced by an O'Reilly or New Riders published book.

Career Highlights

• I defined Comindico's MPLS VPN structure when it was first built, with my Unicity mate Jim Crumpler doing some hard-core geeking-on on the MPLS side of things. Apparantly they're now called Soul. This was real bleeding edge stuff at the time, using MPLS, and MPLS VPNs when Cisco's IOS still had bugs in it and major telcos hadn't moved their core networks to it. It melted my brain, but it was heaps of fun, and I learned what it takes to be a true Cisco CCIE, something I most definitely am not. Those guys are true gurus. Soul's network must scream along if they're still using the stuff we built. Man, that was some cool stuff.
  
• I helped build the Telstra OmniPresence II infrastructure, from its early inception to the massive force that it became. I was particularly involved in the Enterprise Backup and Recovery side of things. My fellow Unicity colleagues deserve the lion's share of the credit: Jim Crumpler for the OmniPresence storage network, and Bevan Anderson for the Backup and Recovery system. Both were world firsts, and various awards in Innovation were won. That's the calibre of person I have the pleasure of working with.
• I've written a couple of bits of free software that people actually use. Not many people, true, but a few other people haven't had to write code because I'd already done it, which is kinda neat. And those are only the people who've taken the time to email me to say thanks, or suggest a bugfix. Thanks again to all you guys who use my software. It's a huge buzz.
• I also wrote big chunks of seafelt, originally written by my mate Jim Crumpler. Have I mentioned how incredibly smart this guy is? He invented the idea of simultaneous availability indication alongside statistical metrics on the same chart. And we're still the only people who do this, 8 years later. Bizarre, yet awesome!
  

Want Help?

If you'd like me, or one of the other Unicity folks, to help you with your company's IT needs, drop me a line at justin.warren@unicity.com.au.

If you're interested in the software products that I work on, use justin@seafelt.com.

I'm also available for speaking engagements, or if you have another, more general, inquiry, drop me a line at justin@eigenmagic.com.