A Belated Introduction

I've been blogging away for a couple weeks now, and I haven't said much about what I do (or have done). So here's a little bio.

I've been working on Sun's for 20 years now. This was originally with The Lionel Singer Group, the Sun distributor in Australia (before Sun Microsystems started up Down Under). In the early days, I actually got to work on 5 of the 9 Sun 1's that were sold into Australia (by another company even before Lionel Singer). I've still got a photocopy of the very first Sun manual. In those days I did pre- and post-sales support and consultancy.

Then Sun Microsystems started up in Oz, and I joined them in January 1987 as employee #7 in Australia. Even though Sun had been going since 1982 in the U.S and elsewhere, this was a startup in Australia. In fact I was the Melbourne office for the first 2-3 months, working from one of the spare bedrooms in my house. Then more people were hired, proper business premises located and leased and it turned into a real company.

During those days I started in pre-sales support, moved to Sydney in 1988 to post-sales support and then into consultancy.

In late 1989, I sent off an email to three managers within Sun working in the U.S. asking if they had anything I could help out on. One said no, one ignored me and the other said yes. This was helping to work on some of the desktop applications in OpenWindows DeskSet. I enjoyed it so much, I asked if it could be permanent. That was arranged and I started doing engineering work for a manager in Mountain View California, but I still lived in Sydney Australia. I was one of Sun's first remote engineers. Once or twice a year, I would come up to the States to meet various folks, and put together plans for what I'd be working on in the coming year. Some of the applications I worked on were the file mangler, the calculator, the clock and the performance meter.

This was fun, but I was finding that by mid-92, I was spending a lot of time on the phone with my file mugger HCI person. It was getting harder and harder to do this job effectively remotely. So I asked if I could move to the U.S. (Sun to pick up the tab). My management said yes. By November 1992, I arrived in California, and I've been living here ever since.

Since then, I've had a variety of engineering jobs. I've worked in the Tooltalk group. I then moved to the OpenStep for Solaris team. In January 1996 I moved to the JavaMedia group within JavaSoft (it's amazing the number of time's I've changed jobs within Sun in January or February).

Javasoft felt like a startup again. A fridge full of free soda. Lots of brain storming with lots of smart people. Fun! I became the tech. lead for Java Collaboration and was the author of the Java Shared Data Toolkit (JSDT), which was released as a Sun product on 26th August 1998, the day after my son was born (a busy week). JSDT is now an open source project on Java.net.

In 1998, I was co-author of the first version of the Java Message Service specification (JMS) with Mark Hapner. In December 1999, I left the JavaMedia group, and became the tech. lead for Netscape 6 for Solaris (basically a pre-Mozilla 1.0 port to Solaris).

Finally in August 2001, I joined the Accessibility Program Office. I've helped add a variety of software to the Solaris Companion CD to help people with disabilities. I've written a Java framework to evaluate the various Text-to-Speech products on Solaris and Linux and most recently I've been helping out with getting JDS (Java Desktop System) working on Solaris x86 for Metropolis. I also am the author of the calculator in GNOME in virtually every Linux distribution (some of this calculator code is based on work that is over 25 years old).

I've done numerous other things over the last twenty years with Sun, but those are the highlights. It's been some of the software and related things that I've done "on the side" that have given me the most pleasure, but I'll save talking about that for another blog entry or two.

On a personal front, I've been married for over eight years now and Lynea and I have a son Duncan who's almost six. We all live in a big old house in Los Altos with two cats and a ridiculous amount of wild life, though thankfully most of that is outside the house.

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( Jun 14 2004, 07:24:23 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink