On Wednesday I attended the funeral of Brad Jackson, a beloved former Cisco colleague. His story is not one for me to tell, but suffice to say we will all greatly miss him. The story I can tell is the outpouring of love and support shared by the greater Cisco community and how much that support has impacted me these last 7.5 years. When I first joined Cisco in 2011, Brad was the systems engineering manager for the local team of engineers based in the pacific northwest focused on the public sector: higher ed, school districts, and local state governments. I worked very closely with that team during my first few years here at the company. He and his wife used to host the Christmas parties at their house. One great tribute they said about him was: “Brad wasn’t just the life of the party, he started the party”. I loved that quote about him. People from Cisco flew in from Arizona, Utah, and other places to show support. It is a testament to not only the great person Brad was but also to the great culture he helped build in the northwest. That time period for me from 2011 to 2014 was very special.
My life and the life of my family has been greatly enriched by the people I’ve met while working at Cisco. Everyone of my managers, team mates, and extended team members down in the trenches have been unbelievable. Cisco is the greatest company I have ever worked at. The work/life balance, opportunities, excitement are unrivaled.
Where am I going?
I’m now an employee at https://zenabidata.com. (And yes, one of my todos will be to fix the website). Today the company does data analytics consulting jobs for large and small companies. We help people turn their data into dollars. There are about a dozen data scientists and I’ll be joining the handful of engineers working on our automated ingestion platform as well as the future products we will release. I will be writing code full time and architecting our solutions together with some really smart people. While I’m very sad to leave Cisco I am excited to be back to working on software design and I’m excited to be tackling AI and ML problems.
