RoboGeek

10 years, sometime around today Well, Java has been known to the world for 10 years or so, now.

We had a party in the courtyard of the Santa Clara campus.  There was drinks, snacks, a dunk tank, James Gosling (and others) being dunked in said tank, and Jonathan Schwartz refusing to get near the tank.  There was a bunch of people, music, and it being Northern California in the Spring, there was some rain.

I was with the team for the 5 year anniversary, and that party was a lot bigger.  For whatever that's worth.  Of course, 5 years ago was a completely different Universe so far as these things are reckoned (e.g. the bubble hadn't even burst yet).

Okay, so what happened?  Other than schmoozing with co-workers and former co-workers who'd been snuck onto campus for the party - we had some speechifying, and a handing out of the official t-shirt and pin.

Hearing James Gosling recollect about Java's early days is always interesting.  I remember when we were discussing moving Swing into "the core", there'd been a raging debate about whether to name the package "java.swing", "java.awt.swing", "javax.swing" or something else.  And that one day James happened upon the Swing/AWT team in the lunch room and I heard him talking about "in the 10 minutes we had to decide X" about how quickly some of the decisions were made in the early days.

Anyway, today he talked about how the "Project Green" people had holed themselves up in a small office suite on Sand Hill Road and been dreaming up science fiction fueled by soda's and ding dongs.  He claimed to be astonished at how we turned their science fiction dreams into science reality. 

And that this weeks most amazing thing he's seeing done with Java is that in Brazil the whole health care system is run by Java.  They've got a zillion things running through cell phones with Java MIDLET's, including filing ones taxes that way.  That's interesting alright.

What I found amazing is the required raising of the hands to find the old-timers.  Most software projects the people come and go, 2-3 years being the typical "stay".  But with Java, there's many who have been with the team for 10+ years.

It's not every day a software engineer gets to work on a product like this.  Speaking for myself that's been a source of why I've been here for 7 years when my original plan was to join for a few months, learn Java, and then move on to somewhere as a Java developer.  To know that what I'm working on is used by millions of people around the world is "juice" ...

(2005-04-22 17:04:16.0) Permalink Comments [0]