Yesterday afternoon I had a fascinating chat with a new acquaintance who also happens to be in the high tech field. Unsurprisingly, we spent a fair amount of time comparing notes and views on a number of different technology and management issues.
What was in fact surprising to me is how this team and organization has quietly changed over the last couple of years. I've--obviously--noticed the changes as they've happened, but talking to an outsider about what we're doing really drove home the point that our world has significantly changed, far more than I had realized. The cumulative effect is astounding.
I'll be writing more about these changes later on, but just a sampling of the topics that had the "wow, you're doing that?" impact include:
- Moving our whole development process outside the firewall, including project team meetings, design discussions, code reviews, and the source repository
- Changing development languages from mostly C and shell scripts to Python
- Significant use of virtualization technologies for development, with investigation into further applications for build environments, test setups, and other angles.
As the Solaris Install team continues moving forward with the new install technologies, I expect that this list will continue to grow, but I'll be trying to step back far enough to see what's worth discussing here. Little by little, it didn't look significant at the time, but in aggregate, this is just remarkably cool.