Building as a means to understand.

Hi There! I'm Erik Smith. I've spent the past 25 years working on IT infrastructure, mostly in storage networking. Since 2024 I've been working on agentic AI systems and the infrastructure that makes them run. I'm currently a Distinguished Engineer at Dell Technologies working in the Office of the CTIO.

The name on this site is provandal, short for "professional vandal," a nickname I picked up while working in E-Lab twenty years ago. It meant something like "the person who breaks things to see how they work." I've held onto it because that's still roughly the job.

What I actually do

My public work clusters into three shapes. I build interactive tools that teach how systems work, like Binary Digit Trainer, KV Cache Explorer, and ProtoViz. I contribute to standards, including inventing Target Driven Zoning (TDZ), authoring NVMe Technical Proposal 8009, and also co-authoring 8010. I'm also the chair of the SNIA Data, Storage and Networking (DSN) community. I write, both here and in longer internal documents that occasionally escape.

The common denominator is that I think complex systems deserve to be legible. Most of what keeps a modern data center running is understandable by any competent engineer if someone takes the time to show them how the pieces fit.

How I work

I build end-to-end prototypes to test ideas, then write about what I've found. The approach I tend to use is something I refer to as "vibe-to-spec" (V2S). The basic idea is to prove something can work as a running system, then derive the specification from the working prototype rather than the other way around. This tends to surprise people who expect engineers to think in waterfalls. It reflects how I actually reason, which is by building.

I have somewhere north of 75 patents, some pending around agentic AI. I was late-diagnosed with AuDHD a few years ago. Learning that about myself reframed (and explained) a lot, but it didn't change what I do, only why it always felt the way it did. I play Bansuri, Native American flute, and Classical flute daily as a meditative practice. I've also practiced Yoga and Qigong for the same reason.

Why this site exists

Most of my professional writing lived on brasstacksblog.typepad.com and was lost when typepad closed down. I've also written extensively about storage networking in the "Networked Storage Concepts and Protocols" techbook published by EMC. I also publish regularly on LinkedIn, about some of the work I do at Dell. This site is kind of a mashup of everything that has come before: a place to publish longer form content that won't stop existing until GitHub does. It will allow me to connect the projects into a coherent body of work, and make it easier for the right people to find the parts that matter to them.

The opinions here are mine. The code is usually on GitHub as provandal. If anything here sparks a conversation you want to have, email is the best channel: reach me at professionalvandal [at] gmail [dot] com.