Hello - my name is Diego Zamboni, and I am very happy to have this opportunity to introduce myself. If you read the CFEngine forums, you have probably seen me around, but it’s nice to be able to step away from official business for a moment and just tell you about myself. I work for CFEngine AS since October of 2011, and my official title is “Senior Security Advisor”. In that capacity, I work on advocating CFEngine as part of the security toolset that any sysadmin should have, and also on providing internal guidance to make CFEngine even more powerful as a security tool. I have recently also started working on interacting with, promoting and nurturing the CFEngine user community. It is often me who posts in the @CFEngine_news twitter account, in the CFEngine Facebook and LinkedIn pages, and I’m often found on the #cfengine IRC channel as well. I very much enjoy interacting with people, writing, public speaking and teaching, so I am very happy in this role as well. I have been interested in computing and technology for as long as I can remember. My first computer was the venerable Timex-Sinclair 1000, which I got when I was 11 years old (and which came with an amazing 2kB of RAM!). Later I spent many, many hours playing with, tinkering with, and programming my Commodore 64, and later a C128. In fact, my first technical publication was in COMPUTE!’s Gazette, which published (in its September ‘91 issue) a program I wrote for cataloguing floppy disks. When I was in college studying computer engineering, I got a job as a sysadmin at the university’s supercomputer center. I was part of the team that managed both the Cray Y-MP4/464 supercomputer (how technology has evolved! That big, expensive supercomputer had 512MB of RAM, 1/16th of the laptop in which I’m typing these words) running UNICOS, and many other Unix systems running Ultrix, Irix, SunOS, NeXTSTEP, and other operating systems. It was during these days that I first started thinking about the issues surrounding the management of a heterogeneous mix of systems, and when I first read about and tried CFEngine, still back in version 1. It was also at this time that I got involved in computer security - there was a break-in into our Cray machine, and I participated in its investigation. I found the process fascinating. Afterwards I kept working in security, eventually founding the university’s first incident response team and computer security group, which continue to exist to this day, in a much more evolved form. Following my security path, I went to Purdue University, where I did my Ph.D. under the direction of Gene Spafford, one of the world’s top security experts. After graduating from Purdue in 2001, I went to work at the IBM Zurich Research Lab, where I worked for eight years doing research in intrusion detection and prevention, malware analysis and containment, and other fun things. In 2009 I returned to Mexico, and in the process switched to a vastly different job as a consultant for HP Enterprise Services. In 2010 I started writing, in my free time, a book about CFEngine. I had realized that CFEngine 3 was somewhat lacking in documentation (being relatively new, and very different from CFEngine 2), and I had been dreaming of writing a book for a long time, so the idea and the timing seemed right. Eventually I got my book proposal accepted by O’Reilly. As a result of this, I started a conversation with Mark Burgess, which eventually led to me getting a new job! I couldn’t be happier: I am working with a technology that I love, and surrounded by amazing and brilliant colleagues. As for my book, titled “Learning CFEngine 3”, I am happy to say that, as you read this, it should be available for sale from O’Reilly and other places. If you have been looking to learn about CFEngine, or want to reinforce your understanding of how it works, please check it out! I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. So, there you have it, now you know a little more about me. I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment here, or contact me on twitter, where I am @zzamboni. I also keep a personal website and blog. See you around!
