Rudy Nedved

Life continues to be an awesome set of twists, turns and challenges.

I worked for years at Carnegie Mellon University, went to a recently IPOed tech company named FORE after the founders most of whom met at CMU, went to a startup called Spinnaker Networks and that startup was purchased by Network Appliance or NetApp where I have worked for too many years. In an industry which is marked by turnover after 4 or 5 year mark, my staying in one place is weird.

I trained as a software engineer but went into IT after hanging around with the best of the best. I would say most of my career has been addressing problems of scale, making things communicate and more importantly making things work cohesively.

Before I started to change careers back to software development, I ended up responsible for all of FORE's R&D labs with a large budget and focused on being proactive and very agile. When I switched back to sofware development, I often would hear comments along the lines of "but your an IT guy!". Yes, I can change my stripes.

I have also been a farmer owning an 80 acre farm with my ex-wife, a professional white water raft guide and continue to do interesting things. As of late, I have been spending a portion of my vacation going to a camping event which is more akin to immersion into a "renaissance fair" called Pennsic which happens north of Pittsburgh with 10,000 people.

My marriage ended in 2009 and legally closed in 2014.

Tech continues to be a fun ride. I worked for cheap for a long time doing all sorts of things including helping with the birth of the Internet up to beyond the cutover from NCP to TCP/IP on Jan 1, 1983 when the "catenet" at some point became the "Internet".

I had tons of fun and tons of work at a startup company that could close its doors on any given day as the "tech bubble" melted down in 2000. I do miss the rush from that environment, the copious amount of code writing and other aspects like driving a critical piece of equipment to the airport to help close a deal.

There are some patents in my name. There is certainly portions of my work spread through out the internet. I even have some interesting connections to internet lore. :-)

It is very interesting to me to frame things between people who are starting out and trying to answer the question "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" and myself at this point. There is high contrast between known track records and unknown ones. What should I do next?

I have been very lucky being in the right place at the right time with the right people. I have also been blessed with help when I needed it most. I work to give back to the world since it has given me so much.

I can't say enough about my fantastic teachers who at times were mentors. I didn't appreciate it as much as I do now. Physics, math and history were so cool. I also appreciated the student exchange program where I got exposed to wonderful people from other countries.

I have two stories.

The first one is spending 9th grade struggling to understand computers.

I was crazy about learning about computers. School policy did not allow me to take a programming class until 10th grade. In 10th grade, I finally got into a programming class. It was with Mr. Meyers, a math teacher and the driving adult sponsor of the student ski club.

He wrote on the board a simple program that displayed something like "hi" or "hello". Things totally clicked. I got it. It is common to hear software people talk about making "Hello World" programs work. I spent the rest of the class doing my own thing.

The second one was me up over winter break from CMU and skating around the Mt Lebanon ice ring trying to process the insanity of my life. I don't know what prompted the longer conversation with a high school student but I got to understand that a new computer system had been purchased to replace the old dialup one. The BASIC class rocked but the FORTRAN class was not going well.

One of the important lessons I had picked up other students and educators at the high school, at University of Pittsburgh and at CMU was about "sharing" how and sometimes why since tech was so confusing and new.

I connected up with Mr Meyers thinking about how much of a trouble I was in his class. He took my help! Wow.

I heard later that the FORTRAN class was actually trying out programs on the new computer. Yay!

It is so important to give to the community.