Friday December 01, 2006

Moving to a new job at Sun

Today is my first day on a new job within Sun. I literally danced a jig when Sun's acquistion of SeeBeyond was announced, because I knew it would open up opportunities for personal growth.

I will still be doing product management, now as a product line manager for the Services group. Sun's strategy of monetizing software at the point of use is largely implemented by developing a portfolio of accompanying services, and that is what I will be doing. It's great to be where the action is, and I have the best of both worlds, in that I will still be working alongside my friends on the Java CAPS team here in Monrovia, though reporting to an entirely different team under Robert Latham in Broomfield. Thanks, Sun!

Saturday July 22, 2006

Still hooked on Rick Riordan's mystery novels

As I wrote back in June, I've discovered a great series of mystery novels set in Texas, in San Antonio and Austin to be exact. The hero, Tres Navarre, is the creation of Rick Riordan, a former middle-school English teacher. The series is terrific -- witty, full of literary allusions and darkly comic bits interspersed with brutal, realistic violence. Since June I've been reading the entire series, starting at the beginning with Big Red Tequila, moving on to The Widower's Two-step, and then to The Last King of Texas, which brought me back to where I started when I accidentally discovered The Devil Went Down to Austin.

I'm really enchanted by the intricate plots, but also by the way that each character is a fully-realized human being. None of the good guys are all good, and none of the bad guys are all bad. The murderers are all too human. And the plots range from corruption at the top of society to gritty conflicts at the very bottom.

As I have read through the series, it seems to me that the stories are getting darker and darker. It will be interesting to see where this goes. Fortunately for me, there are two more in the series, Southtown and Mission Road, and Riordan has promised that there will be more.

Sunday October 23, 2005

Who am I? Hi! I'm David Lee Todd. I'm a product manager in Sun's Monrovia office, which until recently was an independent company called SeeBeyond. We were recently acquired by Sun, and I'm excited to be part of a legendary company. I hope to post on a regular basis, and to talk about software product management, which is a little-understood part of software development. First thing to understand: PRODUCT managment is not PROJECT management. I hope to elaborate more on this theme as time goes on. I also hope to talk about the integration of SeeBeyond into Sun. SeeBeyond made business integration middleware, and it will be the foundation of the Java Integration Suite. It's great to be here, and I anticipate making a lot of new friends in the wider world of Sun. Posted by davidleetodd ( Oct 23 2005, 06:12:08 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [5]