One Computer Leads 1997 Alumnus to Career Choice

An early interest in computers and an unwavering curiosity of how they work led Class of 1997 alumnus Matthew “Matt” Ahrens to an engineering career in the area of file systems management at high-tech companies.

“I had an early Mac in 1986 and wanted to figure out how it worked,” said Matt. “As the Internet was taking off in the mid-1990s, I worked at a mom-and-pop Internet service provider and even designed simple web pages. With that knowledge, I found myself at the only computer in the library at Hamden Hall and started to use it for the newspaper as I was the layout editor and needed to print out articles and tape in photos.”

Matt attended Brown University where he graduated in 2001 with a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science. Following graduation, Matt moved to San Francisco and began his professional career at Suns Microsystems as a staff engineer. While at Sun Microsystems, he co-founded the Zettabyte File System (ZFS) project, which is a file system with volume management capabilities. As part of the project, Matt designed and implemented major components of ZFS, including snapshots and remote replication.

After leading the team at Sun Microsystems for nine years, he transitioned to the position of senior principal software engineer at Oracle, the company that acquired Sun. In 2010, he joined Delphix as a distinguished engineer on the Systems Platform Team where he worked on OpenZFS. In his role, Matt designed new features and performance improvements for ZFS, hands-on implementation, and mentoring team members.

Throughout his career, Matt has been granted 21 patents in the area of file systems management. Matt created the OpenZFS community, a collaboration among FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X, and illumos ZFS developers. He presented at Sun Tech Days, the Open Storage Summit, BSDCan, LinuxCon, and dotScale, as well as creating the annual OpenZFS Developer Summit Conference in 2013, which he organized for more than 10 years.

“It’s about making complex systems simple,” said Matt. “ZFS is 20-year-old software, but it’s been kept alive and evolving through open source technology.”

Currently, Matt is on a career break looking for his next endeavor, which may be a startup. He and his wife Carol live in San Francisco with their two sons Connor and Orion. He noted that with the break, he does strive to continue finding a successful work/life balance and making time for hobbies, which include biking in the beautiful warm weather. 

As his career in engineering started with that one computer in the Hamden Hall library, Matt advises students and other alumni interested in computer science or engineering to “do it for problem solving, not for success, but to design better technology.” He also fondly remembers the late Dr. Barbara Beitch for her biology class, mathematics teacher Judith Bratt, and science teacher Dan Zibello for the outdoors and ropes course.