Joe Stech
I’m currently a Principal Solutions Architect at Arm. I also publish a year's best science fiction anthology.
- Writing Essays, technical articles, and notes.
- Science Fiction The anthology, newsletter, and games that I publish.
Why I'm good at what I'm good at
I help companies migrate cloud workloads to power-efficient Arm processors, a job I converged on by working at every level of the compute stack, from floating gates to cloud fleets.
I studied biochemistry, physics, and computer science in college. After graduating, I wrote firmware for black boxes on heavy civil construction and agricultural equipment for Trimble Navigation. My next role was writing firmware for SSDs at Micron, making sure those electrons stayed where they were supposed to in the floating gate transistors. After that I got interested in data science. I moved to Oracle for nearly five years, where I was kind of like a chemical engineer if the Ph.D statisticians were chemists. I took their algorithms that ran once, and streamlined them so they could run twenty million times in the cloud. After leaving Oracle I became director of software engineering for a clean energy analytics company, where I built the infrastructure behind their first energy storage operation product, helping smooth volatility in the US electric grid to allow more renewable penetration.
Then the entrepreneurial bug bit, and I worked on my own semantic tagging startup for a year, while doing contract work for Reddit and others. That company ultimately failed to gain traction, my house burned down, and I decided I better go get a real job again. I became director of cloud architecture at a tax company, which was acquired by Thomson Reuters.
After leaving Thomson Reuters I joined Arm, where I build tools, write tutorials, create technical demos, and speak at conferences on energy and cost efficiency.
Outside of work, I have an enthusiasm for literary science fiction. For over four years I published a magazine called Compelling Science Fiction, and I currently publish Think Weirder: The Year's Best Science Fiction Ideas. If you like near-future concept-driven science fiction, check it out.