Q: What do you do?

For a long time, my wife, my kids, and I have tried to figure out the best answer to give people when they ask what I do for a living. For the non-technology initiated, it's a bit hard to explain even what my official job duties are, let alone the other stuff I do to help prepare my employer for entry or expansion in various market segments. So, I thought I'd take a shot at it by giving some examples of what I do in different veins and then get your thoughts on how to describe what I do.

I should initially describe the areas I focus on today:

• Ceph
• HPC
• 64-bit ARM support

and the emerging stuff I am watching and participating around:

• AI/Machine Learning
• Blockchain

As far as responsibilities, I'll start with the official job, which is as a Technology Strategist/Solution Architect for alliances. This is where I work to support the expansion of my employer's relationship with alliance partners through technically oriented activity. This includes helping to evangelize specific product offerings or solutions into a partner such as HPE, Cray, Lenovo, etc so that we can investigate ways to go solve customer problems together and make profit at the same time. A big part of this bit of my job is building reference designs and offering advice behind the scenes to our partners on how to architect a particular solution.

Outside of the official job duties, I often tackle things that need to happen.

• I am the strategic event owner for my employer's presence at both the International Super Computing (ISC) show and the Super Computing (SC) trade shows. This involves working with the marketing and events teams to define messaging and booth design. It involves working with engineering, product management and the field SE organization to get the right staffing in place for effective meetings and booth coverage. It also involves working with partners and customers to get the mini-theater setup to have interesting sessions that help tell the SUSE story. Contrary to what you might think, I really enjoy this crazy and challenging endeavor.
• I participate with product and engineering owners for multiple offerings. This includes being active in helping define directions, features, and messaging. It's an awesome thing to be able to engage at this level and help set the course certain products will take and I'm sure you've probably noticed by now that I'm not afraid to share my opinions and vision. This also involves working with press and analysts upon occasion, which is also a very interesting and rewarding responsibility.
• I tend to shepherd some peripheral efforts to my main areas of focus. Recently, this includes working on a sizing tool, working with specific vendors around AI, building a standardized benchmarking tool for my employer's storage product, and working with the Lustre folks and our engineering teams to make some things happen. These are all things that could fall into the next point I suppose, but I thought they deserved their own bullet.
• This one will be the most nebulous to describe, I help eliminate roadblocks to success. When I find a challenge to being successful, I don't just note the issue, but start working at ways to solve it. Whether this is through feature requests, process improvement, helping others, creating educational assets, or building a cross-functional team to affect change, this is just part of getting it done.

That's all the major themes, I do a few other minor things such as architecting a lab environment for my team and helping make hardware just appear, helping find sponsors for internal events, and just trying to be an all-around decent guy to work with.

So, I guess my question to you is this: How should I answer that inevitable question of, "So, what do you do for a living?"