Around this time 20 years ago I got my first job in NVIDIA, an event memorable partly due to September 11 2001. (I was told on my first day of job that I was the only new member of the architecture group during the hiring freeze.)
More memorable are all colleagues whom I am grateful to work with.
Erik Lindholm and Walt Donovan were my de-facto mentors for the vertex and texture units, and I also learned a lot from other unit team members such as Henry Moreton, Simon Moy, Alex Minkin, Paul Heckbert, and Joel McCormack.
I would like to thank John Danskin for his management, and the Kumar dude who introduced the RTL book to me (sorry I couldn’t recall your full name even though I could recall your reaction to dogs).
Bryon Nordquist and Wei-Chao Chen, who worked closely with me in the adjacent units (front end and pixel), had to constantly tolerate my regression breaks.
Interactions with Jakob Nebeker (who claimed that PhD is useless but later got one himself), Will Newhall, Chris Donham (who discovered a bug caused by quantum interference), Trista Chen, and many others have made my job much more enjoyable.
Holding on to my NVDA stocks turned out to be one of the best investment decisions I have made (at this moment of writing) and the price fluctuations made a good mental training.