Jed's Personal page

Mpeg handstand stair walk Nov. 9, 1994, Stuttgart, Germany - about 10 seconds and 1.8 MB.
James E. (Jed) Donnelley - updated November 12, 2024

This is my more personally oriented "home" page. If you are here for professional reasons or if you are interested in more up-to-date information about phone numbers, status, etc., please refer to my Webstart or my LinkedIn professional home pages. Thank you! After our family returned from Germany in the fall of 1995 I started keeping sort of a family oriented log: family journal that has lots of descriptive material and photographs.

I am a person who likes challenges, physical and mental. My university degrees are bachelors in Mathematics and Physics, and a Masters in Mathematics from the Davis campus of the University of California (where I REALLY enjoyed school and packed in every class I possibly could). I was a hacker coming out of school. I dropped into a wonderful environment at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory where I was able to hack the early ARPA network (circa 1973) implementing network protocols and breaking into computer systems on the net as part of a "tiger" team. I was the technical liaison for LLNL to the ARPA network during the middle 1970s. Although my given name is James, there were too many kids that answered to "Jim" in high school, so I changed my preferred nickname to "Jed", my initials.

In July of 1985 I met Yvonne Marie Clark, who had recently moved to California from Illinois. On May 14, 1988 Yvonne and I married. We initially lived in what I refer to as my practice house at 288 Scherman Way in Livermore, CA. That's where we were living when our daughters Faye Lila (9/26/1990) and Claire Anna (6/25/1992) were born. Yvonne adopted my surname that we all use, Donnelley. Our family moved to Germany for a sabbatical leave from 4/1994 - 4/1995. In the fall of 1995 Yvonne and I bought the house at home at 2835 Benvenue Avenue, Berkeley, CA where we still live. The above noted family journal page contains more about our lives in Berkeley.

During my professional career I worked largely on communications (networks), operating systems, and computer security while at LLNL (1972 to 1997). This interview discusses that work. There are also these fun comics from when I was working at LLNL. After moving to LBNL in Berkeley in 1998 I worked mostly on the Web and databases systems for the NERSC computer center located at LBNL. I enjoyed my professional work tremendously. I particularly enjoy working around the technologically incredible people at the DOE labs. I did early simulation studies of "Hyperchannel" in the late 1970s. During most of the 1980s I lead the design and implimentation of a capability based, microkernel operating system (NLTSS) and a related set of network protocols (LINCS and Delta-t) that ran production computing on the Cray computers at LLNL until 1991. From 1990 until 1994 I working in the Advanced Telecommunications Program (now no longer active) at LLNL. In ATP I worked on high speed networks in a variety of forms: Fibre Channel, HIPPI, ATM, SCI, WDM, and others. From April 1994 to April 1995 I was on a professional research leave to the Communication Systems and BelWü Development group in the Regional Computer Center at the University of Stuttgart. I and my family loved our time in Stuttgart. I had a great opportunity to step back from some of my research work and take a good look at the developing Global Information Infrastructure. Much of what I saw found its way into my Web pages in one form or another. We also made many friends in Stuttgart and were sad to leave.

After returning to California in 1995 I again worked for a while at LLNL. First as the integration team leader for a project developing a Scalable I/O Facility in the Livermore Computing organization and later doing Web and database work in the Engineering Record Center at LLNL, basically putting their engineering drawings and submission and tracking mechanisms on the Web. My last work at LLNL was on an electronic job order mechanism that can speed the procurements needed for the National Ignition Facility.

After returning to California I also started a small business selling advertising on the World Wide Web - Webstart. Between 1998 and 2008 I worked in the National Energy Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley Lab providing support for their server systems like ldap, database, email, web, etc., etc. (typically some 50 servers) as part of what is now closest to the Infrastructure Services Group. I retired from the University of California in 2008. Between 2008 and 2014 I worked as a senior Linux systems administrator for the MyPoints division of United Online. In August of 2014 I started working as a Taos consultant on assignment to Guidewire Software. In September of 2015 I converted to working as a full time Software Engineer for Guidewire Software. My work for Guidewire is best documented on LinkedIn. I was laid off from Guidewire in October 2019. I briefly worked as a Reliability Engineer for the company MobiTV until early 2020. I retired in early 2020.

Here is a list of my publications.

I have served in technical, technical leadership, and management positions. I have enjoyed each type of work. I feel I am able to contribute most as a technical leader.

I like people. I like working with people on technology. I often get excited about the potential that I see in science and technology.

I also have a page describing a number of theories/dreams that I have documented to a minor degree on the Web.

I am married to Yvonne and have two daughters, Faye - born 9/26/90 - and Claire - born 6/25/92. My girls (photo summer 2001) are great fun! My time (my "free" time anyway ;-() at home is presently dominated by interaction with them, and I love it! Our girls both briefly attending Berkeley High School. Faye got a bachelors degree from Bard College at Simons Rock and a masters degree from the The University of Edinburgh. Claire got a bachelors degree from Yale in 2014, got her MD from Columbia Medical in 2021, and is now in a residency program back at Yale.

Please consult my Professional biography for a more formal resume. Feel free also to link to my list of publications which contains some that can be accessed directly from the WWW.

P.S. I enjoy showing off (if you are surprised, you must not have loaded the gifs - here's a link to my Google handstand photos album) and have the typically male malady of not liking to ask for directions.

My PGP public key is (note, please check this key from other signed sources before really depending on it):

James E. (Jed) Donnelley <jed-home@webstart.com>