Jim grew up in a one-room house on a dirt farm in the Deep South. After living the life of a starving musician, he left to earn Masters/Doctorate degrees from Stanford University and Georgia Institute of Technology. He went on to become a world recognized leader in Computer Science and software. Today he codes for fun and he plays guitar for love.

Early Years

This is the house I grew up in. It was in the middle of an orange grove in the middle of Florida — no town, just poor people, farm land, and phosphate mines. My father built the house — one day there was going to be a bigger one, but that never happened. This picture shows the house in its better day. There wasn’t enough space for doors inside the house so we just had sheetrock dividers (not painted because there was no money for that either) between the rooms. There was a heater right in the middle of the house — amazing that the whole thing didn’t burn down in the winter.

I worked the fields starting at an early age doing whatever needed to be done. Sometimes we missed school because we had to pick strawberries, okra, etc, or disc the grove. I looked like an ant driving the tractor I was so young. We had essentially nothing, but I had a fantastic childhood.

Lesson 1: Money doesn’t really matter for happiness.

Music Then

I started playing music in my early teens. My first instrument was the trumpet. I became fairly capable, but my teeth got loose and kept cutting my lips to the point of bleeding when I was squealing playing jazz. So, I saved up money for about a year and bought a guitar. Here’s me singing (on the right) at a studio when I was a teenager.

I grew up in the deep south. I learned to play by listening to old blues players and latin players or even new ones at the time (e.g., Allman Brothers, Santana). I travelled the south playing in bands and writing music — mostly blues rock. I met some amazing musicians. I played 16+ hours a day. And I learned a hard lesson in the music business: being good matters, but there are lots of great musicians — luck matters too.

I decided to go back to school for good after an extended stretch of only corn flakes without milk for 3 meals a day (food stamps run out each month!). But, I kept on playing. I played gigs now and again — just to keep my playing current. I even taught guitar at a college at nights for fun.

School

Neither of my parents were well-educated. But, they insisted we go to college — even though I didn’t have a clue what that was. My father died when I was young though so he never lived to see me complete college — something he would have been very proud of. While at college I dropped in and out to play music. Schooling came easy for me, especially mathematics, but I did as little school work as possible.

I didn’t appreciate schooling until much later in life at Stanford graduate school when I realized that in fact there were so many smart people in the world; I finally had to work in school. I fell in love with computer science (back then it was called an offshoot of Electrical Engineering). And I loved it, loved it, loved it.

And I fell in love with discrete math — in my undergraduate studies I had taken virtually every math course but most of it was continuous mathematics (and just how many partial differentiation equations can YOU memorize?). I especially loved recursive function theory and still today Rogers’ book Theory of Recursive Functions and Effective Computability is one of my favorite books. I ended up with a Ph.D. in Computer Science. My Ph.D. thesis was An Architecture for Reliable Decentralized Systems, ISBN B006YIFDY.

Lesson 2: The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

Work

I worked at a couple of companies as an engineer, started a few companies that did well, and helped start Banyan Systems, before finally joining Microsoft in 1990.

My core background is in networking, languages, and operating systems. I love programming. I especially love being close to hardware and even building hardware. I looked funny for an engineer in the early days, but luckily I met an amazing mentor in my early years (Dick Kiger) who looked beyond my wild hair and mocassin footwear and I programmed my fingers off.

Through the years I have written compilers (from system programming languages like C to old business languages like COBOL), operating systems, SMTP systems, file systems (for my Master’s thesis I built a rich, portable file system), distributed directory systems, and of course, tons of networking and distributed computing code for replication coherence, etc.

I love managing small teams, but I have also managed 20,000-person organizations covering a multitude of products and all the engineering, marketing, sales, and business functions. My last position was co-President of the Platforms & Services Division at Microsoft. My heart lies with small teams with a common vision and passion.

My biggest accomplishment at Microsoft was creating and growing the Server business which today is Microsoft’s fastest growing business and their third largest business. I left Microsoft in 2007.

Music Now

Since Microsoft I have been working on composing, playing, singing, and producing blues rock.

I don’t know why music brings up such passion, but it does — from sorrow to joy, from contemplation to determination — a rainbow of feelings. I love it. Whether music or software I believe in passion which leads me to lesson 3.

Lesson 3: Passion and persistence matter more than just about anything else.

Equipment

Guitars: Fender Strat, Ibanez JS1200, PRS special, Taylor Acoustic

Amps: Line 6 Pod X3, Fractal Axe-fx, Fender Super Sonic, Dumble Overdrive Special