e mërkurë qershor 29, 2005

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/pat and my new blog http://blog.chanezon.com

I have left Sun on monday, so I cannot blog on blogs.sun.com anymore. You can find my new blog P@ Log at http://blog.chanezon.com/. The new feed is at http://blog.chanezon.com/xml/rss/feed.xml.

For my new blog I use a new blogging engine called Typo. It is much less fully featured than Roller, which powers blogs.sun.com, but it is a promising server written in Ruby On Rails, a framework I've been playing with a lot lately, and it makes it very easy to play with the engine and add features to it, such as the Ajax Hierarchical Category and Calendar browser I created last month.

Happy blogging to the Sun bloggers: I was very happily surprised at the explosive adoption of blogs at Sun, and the overall quality of the blogs.

Sun Blogmasters, good luck to you: it was a pleasure working with you and a really fun experience. Dave, you can freeze my account now.

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/pat and my new blog http://blog.chanezon.com

I'll give a talk with Dave Johnson and Kevin Burton at JavaOne on thursday: beyond blogging. See Dave's announcement. Too bad Alejandro Abdelnur, our fourth speaker, won't be there. This is the result of my January proposal to make a common presentation of the various syndication projects in java.

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/pat and my new blog http://blog.chanezon.com

Parting haiku

Netscape, let a thousand protocols bloom
AOL, pick the fruits of the boom
iPlanet, autumn rains loom
Sun, shines amid winter gloom
Time to find my way home, like Poldy Bloom!

My career as a code snippet

A little pseudocode snippet to summarize what I've been doing these past 8 years (full details in my resume :-) I have lived through it, but haven't compiled it!

package com.sun.hr.career; 

import com.netscape.server.*;
import com.aol.portal.*;
import com.iplanet.marketmaker.portal.*;
import com.sun.portal.*;
import com.sun.syndication.*;
import com.sun.hr.exceptions.*;

public class PatCareerAtSun {
    public static void main(String [ ] args)
    {
        //consulting Netscape France
        AppServer.importTo(FRANCE).sell();
        //AOL MyNetscape Portal Mountain View
        MyNetscape.get().manage();
        //Sun/iPlanet Market Maker
        MarketPlace iMM = new MarketPlace();
        //Sun Portal France
        Portal.getVersions().next();
        //Sun ROME open source project
        SyndFeedInput input = new SyndFeedInput();
        SyndFeed feed = input.build(new XmlReader("http://blog.chanezon.com/xml/rss/feed.xml"));
        throw new ResignException("let's try something else");
    }
}

I left Sun on monday after 5 years. But among merger and acquisitions I've stayed in the same entity (enterprise servers) for the past 8 years: Netscape, AOL, iPlanet, Sun, doing Portals, eCommerce and Enterprise Servers, so it's a big good bye!

I mosly enjoyed my time at Sun. The things I really liked at Sun are:

• Good people: it was a pleasure and a learning experience to work with so many bright engineers from all over the world. I made many friends at Sun over the years and will keep fond memories from my time here.
• Passionate people: Sun people are passionate about what they do, and very opinionated. This very often brought on us some laughs from the analysts, or the rest of the industry. But in the technology business we're in, I think it is a valuable quality.
• Cool technologies: even if recently I've played a lot with Ruby, Java is still pretty cool in my book (AOP, annotations,...) and the most suitable language and environments for many type of projects. And the Sun Labs people churn out regularly some cool new stuff: Fortress (scientific computing language), Barcelona (multi process VM), Looking Glass (3D Desktop)
• Interesting problems to solve: scalability, maintainability, huge code base, dependencies management, public API definition and deprecation, platform andf app server issues... At Sun I learnt to program in the large and take into account all aspects of the software lifecycle.
• Excellent remote working policy: among the many software companies I've talked with, Sun is ahead of the pack with its remote working policies and infrastructure. I've been working from home in France since 4 years, designing products that were implemented in the US or India, and it worked really well.
• Great recent focus on open source: OpenOffice, NetBeans, OpenSolaris, Sun is putting the lines of code where its mouth is. I did my share with ROME.
• Best corporate bloggers in the world: thanks Jonathan for giving the impulse from the top for blogs.sun.com. Participating to its birth was one of my most fun job at Sun.

Thank you all for these good years, and good luck!

Special thanks to Alejandro Abdelnur: it was really fun working with you!

GP@

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