Day: January 20, 2008

Found: my grandfather’s mill

My grandfather worked at an old fashioned water-powered mill, making flour and animal feed for the county, during the first years of his post-college life and of his marriage. The family has always known where the mill was—right around the corner from the Brackbill farm—but not what has become of it in its post-mill existence.

This weekend I learned that the mill now is the home of an antiquarian bookseller.

(Yes, I think God has a sense of humor. What better way to ensure I make a pilgrimage to uncover part of my Pop-pop’s history than to make sure it’s filled with books?)

The other ironic part: the mill is practically just around the corner from the family farm where I’ve attended reunions my whole life. Why ironic? Because I’ve been reading daily complaints in my grandfather’s diary about how he couldn’t get to work on time. It surely wasn’t because of traffic that he had problems getting there…

Rested and ready

A few days off from the blog were really necessary this week for me to recharge. My silence here belies the work that I was doing elsewhere, though I’m not quite ready to take that work public yet.

It’s been pretty quiet all around, though, and I’m definitely ready to start a new challenge tomorrow in my new position as director of product management at Veracode. What’s Veracode? Well, it’s a fairly unique company—it provides an application security service that identifies vulnerabilities in software binaries. By providing a service that does not require access to application source code, the company can do some fairly interesting things—one-time scans on behalf of a company that is purchasing software, for instance, or single-shot audits for software vendors. I’m pretty excited about the opportunity to work with the team there and to address some of the challenges there in taking their services to the next level.

For a little more flavor of the type of world that Veracode operates in, check out the company blog, Zero in a Bit. Very interesting posts about security, application development, and the disclosure process.