As a consultant with Verilab in Austin, Texas, JL Gray consults and presents workshops around the world on verification methodology and planning. He has also worked extensively on the application of social media to the EDA industry as a means of fostering collaboration in the wider engineering community. JL is well known as the author of Cool Verification, a blog about hardware verification from a consultant’s perspective.

Recently at DAC, JL hosted three sessions for Synopsys’ Conversation Central titled “So You Want to Be a Blogger?” In the following interview, we had a chance to chat about some of the highlights from those conversations.

Rick: What were the key takeaways from your “So You Want to Be a Blogger?” sessions at DAC?

JL: The main takeaway for me is that there is a lot of interest from the EDA marketing, PR, and journalism communities in understanding what it takes to communicate with bloggers. Many of those individuals also want to know how to start blogs themselves.

There was less interest than I expected from practicing engineers, and more interest than I’d expected from folks who are currently unemployed. The funny thing is, I contend it’s much better to start a blog *before* you’re unemployed than after.  Though you have much more time afterwards, you don’t want to have to wait several months while the blog is gaining traction while your savings dwindle. Plus, I think it looks a bit opportunistic. If I was looking at hiring someone who was unemployed, and they have a blog that started around the time of their last paycheck, I’m going to wonder…

Another takeaway for me was the general acceptance of blogging as a worthwhile endeavor by the “establishment.”  At the DAC Birds of a Feather session in 2008 there was a lot of hostility between the traditional press and bloggers, but that has diminished quite a bit in the last year. Now I think it’s generally accepted that it is possible for bloggers to write well-researched and thoughtful content.

Rick: As one of the first EEs to start a blog in the EDA space, why did you originally start blogging?

JL: I started thinking about blogging somewhere around May-June of 2005. At the time I was just starting what was supposed to be a 9-month contract in Dallas.  I had an apartment locally where I stayed during the week, and ended up with time to kill in the evenings. I started thinking about what it would take for me to have more control over the projects I worked on, and even the general path my career would take.

I also had a lot of pent-up opinions about verification. It occurred to me that if I could build an audience interested in what I had to say, I would have a lot more leverage to choose the types of projects I was going to be involved with in the future.  I’d also have an ability to do something that, at the time, was not possible for me:  be a relevant participant in the group of individuals shaping the direction of the industry as a whole.  I’m involved in activities today that have much broader industry impact than anything I was doing back in 2005, and that, to a significant extent, is attributable to my work on Cool Verification.

Rick: You have worked extensively on the application of social media as a means of fostering and enhancing collaboration. Do you see any unique considerations (advantages and/or barriers) within engineering communities that influence their adoption and use of social media?

JL: There are definitely considerations for engineers considering taking the plunge into social media. One of the biggest is the policies of many companies with respect to who can discuss company business in a public forum.  I used to work at Intel, and I was often afraid to share even the most inane piece of information with vendors who had NDAs in place so as to avoid ruffling my boss’s feathers.  Also, people in the corporate engineering environment are often judged based on the work they contribute to the project at hand, and have little motivation to become known outside of that localized sphere of influence.

You can see something similar on the conference circuit. Some companies work hard to publish their results at conferences like DVCon, DATE, and DAC, while others provide little support to their engineers (i.e. they won’t pay for conference registration fees or travel). I actually see this lack of support for collaboration between companies (irrespective of social media) as one of the biggest roadblocks to industry advancement. As a consultant I see companies reinventing the wheel all the time. If engineers were let “out of the box” as it were, companies would be far better off.

Rick: One of the Conversation Central discussions explored the topic “Who owns your blog?” What is your view of this topic as it relates to corporate bloggers?

JL: This is an interesting topic that I feel even some of the world’s top bloggers have failed to adequately consider.  I consider my blog to be an extension of my professional persona… it’s an online extension of who I am, just like my Twitter and Facebook feeds (for example).  If I was an engineering blogger working within the structure of a corporate website, I would question how this activity was worth my time and trouble if I did not, in the end, “own” the blog and associated content (since I am potentially not getting anything extra in return from the company for my effort).  For marketing and PR folks there may be different considerations because it is part of their jobs to write public-facing content.

Rick: Thanks, JL, for your opinions and insights. See you online at Cool Verification,