Life is so good, it gets better everyday....: Glynn :: Blog

Everyone likes stats, especially the Americans - no idea why, I dropped statistics after junior freshman year. Last night Jonathan moved up to second place on blogs.sun.com and our internal blogging alias went crazy with mails trying to figure out what statistics we should keep on the front page, and how often they should be updated. But before we go off on this ego hugging venture and wonder whether being controversial, handing out free stuff or simply regular blogging is directly proportional to the ratings, shouldn't we ask 'you' what you want to see? Do you read Sun blogs through blogs.sun.com, planetsun.org or an external RSS reader? What would you change in the home pages? Do you randomly look through blog titles that you find interesting? Do you find yourself coming back to the same people and same blogs? How did you find us? There are so many more interesting questions that we should be asking, rather than concerning ourselves with who's top on the table.

The first time I joined #gnome in irc.gnome.org it was odd. I think I must have been the first Sun person they had seen since the announcement that Sun was going to join the GNOME Foundation. The channel seemed like a bunch of...well let's be truthful for a bit...complete freaks and whackos at the time [you'll appreciate it more if you read the IRC log when the GNOME Foundation was announced]. I can't imagine how many people had message windows open and talking about this Sun guy who had just joined the channel.

I felt out of place. Random people were talking to me. But I was like this rugby jock, fresh out of college and no where near geeky enough to hold a conversation with these people. I cringe at the thought of ever seeing a log of when I first joined that channel. For some reason, I can't remember, I called myself 'Gman'. The name stuck.

But I kept joining. This GNOME thing seemed cool enough, and I had used it a bit during college. I was really supposed to be a release engineer for OpenOffice.org I think, and was just hanging around until my real manager got back. They kept talking about assimilation when I kept joining - something to do with borgs and Star Trek. These people need to get out more and get some exercise. Hell, ever kissed a girl?.

I remember my first GUADEC. That was a pretty stressful time. Everyone kept shouting at me from across the room, calling out 'Hey, Gman!'. I didn't know who they were, and eventually had to go for an afternoon sleep because it was all too much for me. But there were big names at that conference, and it was awesome to be able to meet them in person and put a name to a face. I was too much of a jock to fanboy them though.

But since those early years, I've made some life long friends. I've learned from them. I've listened to what they have to say. And for the most part, they make an incredible amount of sense. Don't dismiss them because you've been sheltered behind a proprietary development environment for so long, or because a 12 year old kid can code circles around you any time and any place. Quite often they have exactly the same ideas as you and when they don't, you have to push hard your idea home to them with good rationale. That's open source right there - a huge cooking pot of ideas and personalities, all extremely passionate about their work.

Some people just don't get that though. Because they're looking in from the outside. It's hard to believe, if you're not involved.

I've been working at Sun since August 2000, and quite frankly I've never known anything other than OS development. All through university I published my programming exercises that I did for the various courses - everything from the numerical number crunching exercises to simple coke machine simulations. If people wanted to copy them to have a free ride through college, then fine, that was their call. I was certainly never immoral enough to charge people money to look at the code.

Sun has been my first job - I joined straight from college. I was never quite sure if nepotism had a slight part to play, with 2 brothers already working for Sun as James noted. However, it's been a fun rollercoaster ride, and a real joy to find your own niche within the company.

I managed to find myself head deep in the GNOME community. Actually, they found me. Whether it was because they desperately wanted to latch on to someone from Sun after the press conference of Sun joining the GNOME Foundation or because of the amusement value of a kid fresh out of college trying to hack on some pretty complicated, broken session code. Our relationship has gone from strength to strength since those early days, and I think I've made some life long friends, and built up the trust needed to be successful in this type of environment.

For some strange reason I get known as the Face of Sun Microsystems these days, and manage to feature in the GNOME Release notes on a regular basis. I'm not quite sure why.

While OS just comes natural to me, I've seen some pretty different ideas of how things should be done in Sun during my 3 and a bit years. It's a daily source of frustration. I'm constantly involved in discussions when I ask myself 'Geeze, why don't these people understand?', and then I start wondering if they know something that I don't in their many years more experience. It's always a challenge convincing people, and battling against the 'Old habits die hard' mentality.

Sun seems to have a mixed record with OS - I haven't been around long enough to know the full history. I think we've handled the GNOME project pretty well. It's clear we need to be a lot more upfront and communicative on our other projects, instead of the usual 'code dump' that we tend to do - dump the code, and expect the community to adopt it, rather than work on a ground up approach with the community from the very start. Jeff asked me where was the cheerleading going to come for the recently announced JDIC project. Sun is pretty focused on getting Java used for the desktop, yet there's a clear lack of community advocacy happening. [FWIW, I haven't written a single line of Java code since I arrived at Sun, so I'm reluctant to take on that role]. But Jeff is right - we've almost failed at the first hurdle and the announcement went more or less unnoticed into deep space.

So, it been nice to see the recent surge in people blogging at Sun. I think this will help lots, but obviously it's only a first step along the road. It would be awesome to get a voice from above with an 'Open Source is good. Do it!', but I suspect that will get a 'Oh, here we go again!' reply. It's also reassuring to know that there are other smart people out there who just get it. Who wants to join our club? Hrm, maybe it's time to deliver on organizing that Open Source Development conference as part of the Software Development conference that we're holding internally a couple of times a year.

Man, is it hard not to sound like a broken record about this stuff.

Okay, so my first reactions of Roller weren't particularly positive. The user interface isn't particularly inspiring, and most of the default themes had some guys like Dave Johnson, Lance Lavandowska and Matt Raible in the sidebar. I assume they had some sort of part in writing the software, but I think their ego got the best of them in this occasion. Anyway, after a quick read of the user documentation, some hair pulling and some stolen source from GNOME, things are a little bit more normal. Still not overly keen on Roller, but after 2 hours I'm up and running - not bad, aye?

Figured I might as well stake a claim on 'gman' for blogs.sun.com. I'm still mostly going to continue my regular blogging on my GNOME blog though, as it's the nice balance between the corporate and community that I'm involved with on the GNOME project.