Let's start with work oriented descriptive terms, as my leisure time is often mixed in with engineering obsessions, and the saying of "it pays the bills" happens to be more than a primary driver for most adjacent interests, hobbies, and of passions non-tactile.
Corporate Taglines
Eva Winterschön is a systems architect specializing in high-performance storage, accelerated networking, secure hybrid-cloud virtualization, embedded systems, and bare-metal clustering. Her quarter-century career has spanned multiple engineering specializations, culminating in a sustained focus for building global environments with high-performance systems and distributed storage architectures.
The Duration of One Decade
2023 - Present: Eva co-founded an agentic-llm research startup with her husband, focusing primarily on HPC and HFT workloads driven by algorithmic analysis, derivatives-defined via neural-network based consensus-trust.
Concurrently, she contributes to OSS communities involving FreeBSD and OpenZFS. In her reflective time, she authors a website (it's this one!) for engineering topics, with reflections on personal life along with insights on philosophy and cognitive neuroscience.
2025 - 2026: Eva focused her cognitive output on the design and implementation of advanced storage architectures at Cerebras Systems, uncommonly known for creating the world's most advanced Ai Computational Clusters and one or several Supercomputers.
2017-2024: Headquartered in San Francisco, Eva's role as Principal Architect at Fastly's global CDN saw her building their Pre-Production Load-Test Automation platform from the ground up, creating and leading the Performance Engineering and Hardware Research labs which supported one of the world’s largest web-caching infrastructures. This often unmentioned (not loudly cloudflareish) content delivery network's scale and scope was immediately defined as "Critical Infrastructure" during the 2020 pandemic, and continues to serve 30%+ of global internet traffic.
1999-2017: Over past decades there have been many datacenters, air-gapped networks, database clusters, booming/bursting startups, IPOs and M&As, dark fiber metro-grids, long range private-spectrum back-haul, tropical rainforest networking, and nearly everything in-between. Anything older than a decade passes into the mists, experiences returned to the idealism and occasional follies of youth and "a life well lived".
All of the Things to Love
Ideally, the list of loves is longer than those of disfavor, and generally so with the ways in which this nor-endless supply of time may be accounted and allocated towards.
From the thigh burning arts of Telemark and Backcountry Skiing, Free Diving favorite reefs in the tropics of Central America and the South Pacific, some tens of thousands of miles of Road and Cross-Country Cycling, Long Range Marksmanship (AICS/308), to Wilderness Trekking and Winter Mountaineering ...
The List of Loves is an ongoing tale of endurance, of pain and struggle, and overcoming adversity in the classical sense of Sisyphean ways and means.
Consuming the Written Word
Eva's forever fondness for reading is typified on three primary genres.
- Non-Fiction: biographies and autobiographies of classical High-Altitude Mountaineering climbers, as well as their peers in the terrifying endurance tales of 19-20th century Arctic and Antarctic explorations. Perhaps as the only one-man out of the fray, it was Webb Chiles' first book which drew my attention to solo global circumnavigation by sail ("Storm Passage: Alone around Cape Horn", a record-breaking 203 days in 1977).
- Hard Science Fiction: cyberpunk, space marines, synthetic human engineering, dystopian futures, and tales of sentience instantiation. The genre is expansive, beautiful, yearning.
- Historical Romance: an enduring propensity for mid-20th century tales of love, set to the backdrop of decades surrounding "The Great War" and World War II and everything in-between: tales of forbidden love which often end more desperately than Juliet's worst nightmares, of sacrifice, of loyalty and honor, yet too often simply hope turned to tragedy (hint: our people did not fare-thee-well).
Expressions via Externalization
Driven to comprehend the expansiveness of this often tumultuous sensory world, earlier and more innocent years found emotion channeled towards expressiveness via short stories, discretely ghost-authored research papers, and penned poetry now archived into the rarest of recollections. Photography endures as a primary modality: from 35 mm film to digital capture, each image serving as a disciplined study in autobiographical memory.