The best open source company in the Czech Republic

The best open source company in the Czech Republic

Sun Microsystem Czech was voted by the community as the best open source company in the Czech Republic



for continuous support of NetBeans (as the official nomination says).

Congratulation, this award goes to everyone who helped to promote open source technologies in Czech Republic!

Posted at 10:48PM Jun 11, 2008 by Pavel Suk in Prague Engineering Center  | 

Students from EPFL in Prague

Students from EPFL in Prague

Sun, with its roots in Standford University is very open to students. We hosted students from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) this Thursday.
It's a prestigious university, part of École polytechnique fédérale (EPF), where the father of modern science Albert Einstein studied. I'm sure that at least one of these students that I talked to will become as famous as Albert and - of course - they will remember the most influential moment in their life, the visit to Sun Microsystems.

How did it go?

We did a couple presentation to them. I started with an overview of the company, Lukas Rovensky followed by talking about Open Solaris. Rouman, the superstar as always, entertained folks with NetBeans 6.0. His demo and presentation generated heated discussion, especially about developing modules for NetBeans. There was interest to develop a Latex module for NetBeans, so we'll see.

Martin Grebac finished the whole program with a Glassfish demo and last but not least students went to the Usability Lab and Software Lab, where they saw how we test our software.

Kudos to all people who participated in this event, including Dal mas Sylviane and Lenka Kasparova who prepared the whole event.
 

Posted at 03:47PM Feb 03, 2008 by Pavel Suk in Prague Engineering Center  | 

Best Employer in IT Category

Best Employer in IT Category

Sun Microsystems Czech became the best company from IT industry in the Best Employer, Czech Republic Study. 
We've repeated the success from last year, when we won the category and left Microsoft behind.

The absolute winner from all 42 companies that participated this year is IKEA, we won 5th place in total. 

So why did we place in TOP 10 for last 3 years?

Here is my theory:

• SMART PEOPLE
  There are a lot of very smart  people working at Sun. I was impressed about high technical level of engineers in my first day here and I'm still amused. Smart people know what they want to do in their career and life. And they're very vocal if they can't get the job done, due to any bureaucratic obstacles. So it gets fixed.
  
• TEAM
  Team is more than the sum of individuals. Team is about helping and respecting each other, leveraging individual skills and knowledge. I've seen companies where the team members competed with each other. Glad not to see it here in engineering.
• CHALLENGING JOB
  Although each job can be boring after a while, it doesn't happen so often, if you need to keep up with the latest technologies.
• FUN
  It's a shame my team of Lab Managers lost the Laser game against Gatekeepers on Tuesday, but I'm sure they had a good time there (counting the number of hours they spent there). Next time I need to clean up my calendar from all evening calls, so I can join them.
  

Long weekend is coming (May 1st is a public vacation and most people take a day off on Monday), time to celebrate the success.

Posted at 05:56PM Apr 27, 2007 by Pavel Suk in Prague Engineering Center  |  Comments[1]

Hidden cost for books from online bookstore

Hidden cost for books from online bookstore

QUIZ:
If you buy 7 books for $190 on amazon.com, how much you pay for shipping&handling and customs clearance/delivery to Prague?
a) nothing
b) $72
c) $190

I was signing invoices this week and I was quite shocked to see the total cost for 7 books that one of the engineer ordered on amazon.com. Freight charge, shipping and handling (Amazon) was $72 and custom clearance (using UPS) $118. The total cost is $380, twice more than  the original cost.

Second case was even more straightforward, books for $51, Amazon shipping&handling $13.50, UPS custom clearance $102.5.

So I went to Amazon UK and calculated the cost without custom clearance, since there is no custom, if you send it within EU.

Surprisingly, the bill looked very different:

	Cost [USD]
Books	255
Postage	51
VAT	16
Total	322

So eventhough the cost of the books was originally $65 higher, we could save  $58 in total, if it'd be ordered from UK.
Amazing, how much money you can save by choosing the online shop that's closer to you.

Posted at 09:31AM Mar 12, 2007 by Pavel Suk in Prague Engineering Center  | 

Laurie Tolson on Czech JUG

Czech Java User Group - first meeting

One would assume, that if there is a Technical University that teaches 1300 students Java language in their first class AND huge community of Java developers, including the ones that work in Sun Microsystems Czech on NetBeans and other Java applications, there would be very active Java User Group. Well, you need to have a catalyst, you need to have people that know other people so they can create a social network. Malcolm Gladwell in his The Tipping Point book calls them Connectors.
Fortunately, Roman (also called Roumen) is a person of that kind. He called first Czech Java User Group meeting and organized the presentations, including live video stream, which was done by AV Centrum Silicon Hill.
I expected almost formal meeting, since there was Mr. Havlicek, Dean of Czech Technical University, Ing. Rudolf Pecinovsky, author of several books about Java and Object Oriented Design, Pavel Suk (hey, that's me!) and Laurie Tolson, Vice president for Java and Developer Products and Platform at Sun Microsystems. It turned to be very pleasant evening hour.

Laurie talked about open sourcing Java SE, pretty hot topic in these days. It will be interesting to see future directions there. Is there going to be a strong governance model, where only few developers, that proved their knowledge and ability to make changes without breaking the code, will be allowed to contribute?  How the community can help with testing the Java SE? Can someone clone the code and sell his own version? How to keep the compatibility? Or reliability?
Yeah, having experience with NetBeans, I can imagine the fun that the team will have with resolving all these issues before everything goes open.

Roman then talked about future JUG meetings and that's where it's going to be more interesting for techies:

• September, 26th: Jason Van Zyl and Milos Kleint will be presenting  Maven
• October: Annotations in Java, presented by developers from JetBrains. The second presentation will be also about new feature in Java SE 5 -  Generics, presented by Tomas Zalusky.
  
• November: Bruno Bossola from JUG Milano will talk about Open source tools for testing Enterprise applications
• December: Roman Pichlik, Systinet - Spring 2.0, Martin Krajci Systinet - Java Persistence API

More information is on  czjug.dev.java.net (in English)  or java.cz (in Czech).

Posted at 03:07PM Sep 14, 2006 by Pavel Suk in Prague Engineering Center  | 

When engineers wear suit and tie - Press Conference with Czech Government

When engineers wear suit and tie

Press Conference with Czech Government

I used to wear a business suit, when I worked for my previous employer, but I've completely converted to t-shirt & jeans after joining Sun. I don't miss old times, neither my wife, she doesn't have to iron shirts anymore.

But sometimes you must be compatible with people that you're dealing with, which happened to me last Wednesday. March 15th, I need to record it, it might be the only occasion this year when you can see me as Man in black ;-). 

Interesting Guests

There was a Press Conference and Official Site Opening ceremony with pretty important guests. Starting from the left: 
Jeff Jackson [Vice President, Java Enterprise Platforms & Developer Products], Linda Park [Vice President, Software Lifecycle Engineering & Global Engineering Organization], Tomas Hruda [CEO, Czech Invest], Crawford Beveridge [Executive Vice President People and Places and Chief Human Resources Officer, Sun Microsystems], Ing. Dana Berova [Minister of Informatics, Czech Government], Ing. Jiri Havel [Deputy Prime Minister, Czech Government] and Zdenek Pilz [Country Manager, Sun Microsystems].
Czech newspapers, IT magazines and Czech News TV Channel CT24 attended the conference also (it wouldn't make sense, to organize a press conference without press, would it?)

Why Sun decided to invest in Czech Republic?

Crawford Beveridge started with very nice speech, talking about 'Why Sun decided to invest in Czech Republic?'
So, what are the key factors for investing in Czech Republic for IT company like Sun?

• Talent quality and availability
  
• Ease of doing business
• Operating costs
  

Sure, it was also about NetBeans, small start-up company that Sun acquired in 1999.

I followed up with a presentation about Prague Engineering Center, listing groups that are here and talking about products that are developed in cooperation with other engineering centers  that Sun has around the world. I also talked a little about the history of Prague Engineering Center.

BTW: here is one of the oldest pieces of the code in NetBeans that survived several years (according to Jarda).

NetBeans Mobility  Demo

The most interesting part of the presentation (at least for me) was NetBeans Mobility Demo.

Martin Ryzl did an excellent job there. He developed an application in 3 minutes and deployed it to his mobile phone. Very nice. I hope that all people from press can start developing Java  applications for their mobile phones now.

 Questions?

A couple questions about labor market were answered by Dana Berova and Jiri Havel. Tomas Hruda from Czech Invest talked about incentive programs for IT companies.

Show must go on, break the wall

When all these speeches were over, it was a time for official opening.

Were we going to cut the ribbon? No, no ribbon please!

There was a virtual wall created by lasers. A kind of sci-fi arrangement, very high-tech. Jiri Havel pushed the RED BUTTON and .... the wall disappeared.
Yeah, that's going to be our future - break the wall by pushing a button.

---

Posted at 04:45PM Mar 24, 2006 by Pavel Suk in Prague Engineering Center  |  Comments[1]

Working from new office - so far so good

I'm working in new office today. People pluged their computers into the network, logged into phone systems, changed their default printer and they are set up.Hmm, business as usual, no major problem so far.

Oh yes, there is one - the chairs from Steelcase are pretty inteligent, maybe too much. Fortunately, we've got a training from the vendor (Linstram) today, so I know how to set up my chair now.

Posted at 12:12PM Feb 27, 2006 by Pavel Suk in Prague Engineering Center  |  Comments[0]

Moving to The Park - Day D

Monday, February 27th, is the first day, when SW Engineers in Prague Engineering Center will start working in a new building. Finally! After all compressions, occupying former training rooms, LAB space or cafeterias, we will have enough space for expansion. Big relief.

So where are we moving?

New office is located in The Park on Prague 4, the area with pretty high density of IT companies in Prague. Fortunately, it's not just IT there, they opened a big shopping center Centrum Chodov close to the office. There is even Beer Point, pub in the shopping center, can you believe that?

So, everything is ready. About 30 engineers packed their stuff as well as lab equipment on Friday and it has been moved to the new office during the weekend. Several of us worked there last week, to test the environment. I was lazy to unpack my notebook, so I used SunRay client, connecting back to server room in old building and everything worked fine! Kudos to all people that worked hard to make that happen.


Let's see what will happen in a couple hours, when all engineers come to work!

Posted at 12:34AM Feb 27, 2006 by Pavel Suk in Prague Engineering Center  |  Comments[10]