What this series is, why it takes the form of a Request for Comments, and how to read the header on every document is RFC-0001. This document is about the person writing it.
1. Who writes it
I'm Dan Hersey. I build hardware and software products, and this site is where I think out loud about how they should work. The work has almost always been B2B, and almost always as the person accountable for what ships rather than the person writing the code.
What interests me is not what AI can do, but how it changes the way we do it. Mostly that means software development, and what follows for product management, a discipline shaped almost entirely by software being slow and expensive to build.
2. Background
I started as an AIX administrator in the late nineties and moved into storage networking, which took me to Andiamo and then to Cisco when it acquired us. The years that followed were Cisco's data center portfolio, back when a data center was a room you walked into rather than a region you selected: MDS, Nexus, the Nexus 1000V that put the switch inside the hypervisor, and UCS.
Then converged infrastructure at VCE, SDN at Big Switch while OpenFlow was new, and private cloud back at Cisco. At Oracle Cloud Infrastructure I launched Roving Edge and Multicloud, led the migrations off the first-generation platform, and built the outbound product organization behind them.
MDS, Nexus, UCS, the Vblock at VCE and OCI itself each went from nothing to a billion-dollar run rate.
Most recently I ran worldwide go-to-market for NoSQL databases at AWS, where the work was largely about helping customers put their data to work in AI systems. Then I led product for a healthcare AI suite at Oracle, taking agentic systems from nothing into customer production.
3. What I'm working on
I advise startups and friends building with AI, usually on the unglamorous half of the problem: what to ship, what to cut, and how to tell whether a demo is evidence of anything. If you're working on something and want a second read on it, LinkedIn is the best way to reach me.
The rest of the time goes into using the tools seriously enough to have an opinion worth arguing with, which is what most of these documents are likely to be about.
4. Elsewhere
5. How commenting works
The name is an instruction. If a document here is wrong, incomplete, or interestingly arguable, reply in the thread under it. Nothing here is a standard and nothing has been reviewed by anyone but me, so the correction rate depends entirely on who takes that invitation seriously. RFC-0001 has the detail on what happens to a good objection.
6. Colophon
Built with Astro, deployed on Vercel. Set in IBM Plex Mono and Source Serif 4. Design inspired by the typography of the RFC series, a format that has carried working ideas since 1969.