Forty-Two : Weblog

Wednesday Sep 26, 2007

So long and thanks for all the fish

Tomorrow I will leave Sun. It has been a wonderful experience. Today, on the openInstaller IRC we were reminiscing about our careers at Sun and it got me thinking I should write down mine.

When I went back to school after a few years of trying to find my way. I set a goal to graduate with a degree in computer science and have a job at a good technology company before I was 30. Over those years I was fortunate enough to visit San Francisco often and I became enamored. So, I decided to pack up and drive to the bay area. I set a new goal, to go work for Sun, SGI, Apple or HP. What I considered the big four in technology at the time. When I arrived, after skiing my way across the country, I had my first interview at Sun 5 days later. I was psyched. Menlo Park was just finished and the place was buzzing. Well, since I had a degree from a school that was not one of the big 5 at the time I had to wait. So, I borrowed a laptop, and started re-learning Unix. I would call the hiring manager twice a week just to let him know what I was learning. 3 months later, I had an offer and I started at Sun 3 days before my 30th birthday. Goal accomplished!

I started in March 1996 as a Solaris kernel patch test engineer. I was nervous, excited and having the time of my life. I met one of my best friends, Bren, that week. He took me under his wing and really helped me excel. After testing patches for a while I decided I wanted to be a development engineer. My manager had just taken a position in a new group and I was chomping at the bit. I applied for the job, working on Solaris install.

My first project was to move the development effort from our Colorado Springs site to Menlo Park. That was a chore. The site was being shut down and I had to go there and learn as much as I could and gather all the data and receive toi's. After that, I was given my first project. Solaris 7 64 bit install support. I had to dig into the code and figure it out. What fun! From there I worked on the, now infamous, cd0 project. The initial goal was to enable sun4u systems, >200Mhz cpus, to run older Solaris (2.5.1, 2.6 and 2.7) releases. It succeeded and without it we could never have sold as many as we did. The core technology for cd0 is still used today. I then worked on the new Solaris installer for Solaris 8. That was a challenge. As many know, our support for x86 at the time was less than stellar. We lacked drivers and the disk management interfaces were lacking. They are just now getting addressed with openSolaris and the Caiman project. My final project as a developer was to enable upgrade from systems managed by Solaris Disksuite. Solaris Volume manager was being integrated into Solaris 9 and we needed to be able to upgrade roots with mirrors. I started that project. About half way through I was given an opportunity to become a manager. I was reticent, but I felt I was cut out for the job.

Sun managers are technical and also get to help their teams in career growth. My first team consisted, mainly, of my former peers. They were great and made the transition very easy. I learned so much from that team. I managed them through Solaris 9 and most of Solaris 10. We delivered Live Upgrade, Solaris Flash, numerous jumpstart enhancements, assisted with the initial BigAdmin site, were initial members of the N1 project and even managed to fix some bugs. It was a tough job, however, since install is often the whipping post for any number of problems. But with a good team you can get through anything and we did.

What is now my last job at Sun has been the most exciting. We were to gather requirements, architect/design, create and deliver a new installation framework. Initially it was to be the unifying framework for Sun. That however was a tough task to accomplish as Sun struggled to regain profitability. The goal had to be reset and the final goal was to deliver a cross os platform installer for Sun's middleware. The project was code named purplehaze. It was often criticized, maligned and snickered at internally but the team we assembled powered through all that. Making it easy to piece together all these disparate products was important. After a year and a half of a piecemeal team working part time on purplehaze and part time on the Java Enterprise System, we were given the green light to grow the team. For the past year and a half we have worked hard and in June delivered openInstaller. The first product shipped using openInstaller last month and others are in the works. So, job accomplished. Another great team, pulling together and getting it done!

So, while I am saddened to have to leave Sun and all the great people I have had the pleasure to work with over the years. I am also excited about the new challenges around the corner.

Thank You Sun and so long and thanks for all the fish!

Forty-Two

Posted at 11:47PM Sep 26, 2007 by Matt Williamson in Personal |

Tuesday Sep 11, 2007

OpenInstaller 0.9.4 Released

Version 0.9.4 of Cross platform Install Framework

Zip Support

Zip based packages for all supported platforms Solaris, Linux, Windows.
Untested on MacOS, AIX
and HPUX.

Zip Product Example

Cross platform install example using zips as packages

Product Selection

Create more complex installers comprised of multiple products
New Product Selection UI page created
Works with Upgrade

Install over HTTP

Using Java Web Start and JNLP an http based distribution
can be created.
User run over JNLP

Configuration Heartbeat

Using JMX a product configurator can provide a heartbeat
to the progress bar to give accurate feedback to the user.

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Project openInstaller:
https://openinstaller.dev.java.net/index.html

Available for download:
https://openinstaller.dev.java.net/downloads_index.html

The full release notes are available:
https://openinstaller.dev.java.net/docs/releasenotes/0_9_4.html

Please download and try!

Posted at 01:58PM Sep 11, 2007 by Matt Williamson in Sun |