Madhura's Blog

Got a note from a friend from India asking why haven't you been in touch. She asks, is it because you have been busy shipping jdk6 beta? Dang! My first blog was during jdk6 beta, I blinked my eye and so much has happened.

Alright what all have we missed? Let me start with the disclaimer: I will end up jumping around topics while spilling the events and my thoughts around them in an unorganized-but-hopefully-coherent fashion. . So fasten your seat belts and bear with me...
To recap: we have shipped a fabulous desktop-feature-rich JDK6. Right now, we are on track to deliver jdk6 update2. [You are going to love the new and improved JRE install experience!] While working on these commercial JDK releases, we also worked on getting a fully buildable open source JDK out in time for Javaone 2007. Yes among other things like openJDK testing, we also got the quality portal created in time for Javaone. Go take a peak and be part of the team.

Am I forgiven now for not getting to my blog scratchpad for the past year? By the way, have a confession to make regarding the last blog---I talked about beta needing a full qualification and how it was justified for it to lag behind the latest snashot for the sake of the corporate customers. Guess what? The world has changed! After all that effort spent on qualifying the beta, we realised there are more flying tomatoes in the world and so very few elephants... [Elephants? Our VP Rich Green tells us about these elephants - The ITs of the corporate world, which need this near-perfect release before they start thinking of trying or deploying it] And then there are the mere mortals a.k.b.m.a [as known by me as] flying tomatoes who are not afraid of and on the contrary want the latest and the greatest for a spin. The most feedback we got was by these FTs on the latest snapshots. Not on the three month old beta. What can I say other than makes sense and that the learning continues. We listened to these hints and are planning to go towards the short and sweet betas. To give you the latest bits as fast as possible so we get the valuable and most relevant feedback.

In an unrelated incident i started rock-climbing and I quite enjoy it. I can climb 5.9s and sometimes can bag an easy 5.10 Yooohooo! :) It's climbed on the charts as my 4th favorite activity. Dancing, snowboarding , scuba diving being the first three. While on the diversion i must confess, due to all that has been happening at work, haven't really gotten time to go rock climbing much, sorry Ken, i promise i'll join the tuesday rock-climbin ritual next month, come-rain-or-shine.

Back to the 8-5 (yeah, right! Who am I kidding.) world. Aren't you excited about the open possibilities.....Don't know about others, but all of us in JDK quality team surely are. We are as excited about opening Java as all of you are. Cheers to the free spirit that is in the air! Thoroughly excited to expand the JDK team to be the whole Java community. Day one at Javaone was quite exciting....and am looking forward to the rest of the days to cross path with the non-sun-not-outsiders-anymore Java aficionados... more from me later...