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

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.