Roman Shaposhnik's

As you might have noticed in my previous blog entry I really wanted to get your opinion on my interview. But aside from the usual curiosity I had a practical reason to beg for it to be reflected in the comments section of my blog. Because you see, the other part I had to do for the Linux episode of the SDN Channel resulted in the most bizarre and troubling interaction I have ever had while working for Sun.

And that other part I am talking about is making of flash demos.

As a producer of these demos I really wanted them to do one thing -- transport every viewer into the office(s) of the guys who actually wrote the software in question (one way or the other). I wanted them to be as geeky and as similar to the usual hallway conversations we all have as possible. One thing I didn't want them to be was flashy and marketing looking. I'm a developer myself and I consider it to be a bait'n'switch when somebody is trying to feed me a marketing presentation calling it a developer demo.

Two demos were produced under these assumptions and they were shown to a bunch of colleagues of ours. Both native and non-native English speakers. The response we got was almost unanimous -- audio might use some fixin' but otherwise they are nice. The coast was clear and the demos were on their way to http://developers.sun.com when all of a sudden we had a really strong pushback from a new person responsible for ok'ing everything that goes on our site. What that person demanded was a total removal of *both* demos (which wasn't half as bad as the actual reason given to us). Now, don't get me wrong here I would be the first one to agree that the technical merits of these demos are probably not quite at the level where I would feel comfortable submitting them for an Oscan nomination. That I was prepared to hear and discuss. But I was completely unprepared for an actual reason that was given to me: I was told that the only reason they wouldn't be published is because having demos narrated by non-native English speakers or even by somebody who doesn't happen to be a professional voice talent is below the quality bar that is acceptable for a successful image of Sun microsystems.

Just like that

I tried to argue my case. First by trying to convince my opponent that it is always better to hear an unscripted developer chatting about things which are near and dear to him than to have a voice talent doing a lip syncing job. I even referred to the governor of the state of California elected to his position regardless of the thickest middle-European accent since Kissinger. All to no avail. I think somewhere along the way it actually got personal (after all when it comes to accents I'm as touchy as the next [Slavic] guy)

At that point I stopped arguing and figured that as long as one of the demos did survive and as long as Jonathan has a soft spot in his heart for http://blogs.sun.com I can safely use this place instead of the official one (http://developers.sun.com) to talk to the sort of guys and gals I want to talk to -- you.

And so without further ado, here's a portion of the SDN portal which you were not supposed to see. And as with my previous plea I hope that you would find it possible to spend a couple of minutes adding a comment or two on what you saw and heard. I can not stress enough how important it is for me to find out whether all of the allegations made against this demo (and even the first one!) are true or false. And who's the better force to set this record straight than you -- viewers and listeners we created this demo for. Just keep in mind one thing -- I don't want to assert that quality of the audio here is good enough for a broadcast all I'm trying to say is that it is comprehensible. Should we do better next time? Absolutely! Was it necessary to remove this demo ? NO!

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Sun Studio Next Generation IDE Tour

Watch the Sun Studio Next Generation IDE Tour See what kind of the IDE experience you should be preparing yourself for once we made it available for early adopters some time later this year. This demo was created by (in alphabetical order): Andrew Krasny, Maria Tishkova, Anton Vysotsky and Anton Youdkevitch. Editing and postproduction -- Roman Shaposhnik. The team would like to thank Anya Barsky for feedback and support and Jonathan Schwartz for being a Patron Saint of http://blogs.sun.com. » Take the IDE tour (flash)

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P.S. And especially if you happen to be a non-native English speaker please let me know whether you had major difficulties understanding the demo. One of the allegations against it was exactly that it would be practically impossible for non-native speakers to understand it. However, as a non-native speaker myself I find it particularly hard to believe.

Last week I had my first ever public exposure of a major kind and now that I can finally sit back and relax somewhat I guess it's time to put my first impressions in writing (before I forget them altogether) and also set the record straight on things which turned out to be not quite the way I expected them to.

As you could very well imagine for a non-native English speaker like myself the toughest part was the interview itself. And even though I have some experience in lecturing and giving presentations at various technical and scientific conferences I don't have a habit of augmenting my slides with exact words I want to say or otherwise script my speeches. I usually just give myself a framework of slides and then I try to improvise within it. Sometimes it works great, sometimes not, but the crucial difference is -- once I'm done with my live presentation the only thing I have to fear is an occasional rotten tomato, in case of an interview (which is supposed to be available on-line for at least a couple of weeks) the stakes are much higher. That said, the pressure wasn't really severe enough to make me repeat the Demosthenes's routine but it surely was enough of a motivation to make me do the proverbial homework at least a couple of times before the shooting date. I think it helped a great deal because when I did arrive to the set on Monday I really knew what I wanted to talk about and how I wanted to phrase it. I spoke for about 10-12 minutes and when I was done I actually expected our producer to call it a wrap. After all, at least in my opinion, it was the best dozen or so minutes I could possibly muster anyway. Instead they told me -- too long and too geeky. We need more entertainment. And thus the battle for entertainment has begun. We did 5 takes total and by the end of it I was talking a mile-a-minute and was really delivering a bunch of sound-bites instead of talking about things I felt like talking. Luckily when it was all over they told me that the end result is going to be a composite of the best segments from all of the outtakes not just the last one. Now, frankly, looking at the final product I don't think I have anything to complain about in a big way. It looks professional and I have only myself to blame if there's anything wrong with the presentation or material, except may be the final speech where they cut to the host way too early while I still talk which in my opinion looks a bit silly. That said, I still feel a bit sad about a couple of points I was trying to make which didn't make it into the final video. It would be nice to have an opportunity of making a sort of "director's cut" based of the raw outtakes and be able to show it for anybody with an attention span larger than what producers of the show are used to. Micheline (my host) is now doing her best trying to talk our producer into releasing these tapes. But before that actually happens, here's what I remember from my favorite part that didn't make it. Enjoy and please leave your comments on whether you liked the interview or not. It is really important to me. And I'm going to explain why in my next post.

Believe it or not, but it all began almost 8 years ago when I was hired to work for Sun doing C++ compiler. Of course, given that I had started to tinker with Linux even earlier -- one of the first things I suggested to my manager was to port the excellent software which at the time was known as Sun's Workshop to Linux. I think at the time Linux kernel was around 1.0 and if my memory serves me right the answer I got from my manager was : "Linux who?". Fast forward 5 years and you can find me in Sunny California doing all sorts of compiler related projects for Sun. What is different though is Sun's attitude towards Linux. There's an embracement of it on the deployment side -- there's even some embracement on the development side because of Sun Studio 9 which had tools available on Linux, but still no compilers. There's a general interest in Linux, but nobody is ready to stand up in one of those PowerPoint meetings and claim that we MUST port compilers to Linux NOW! That said, the approach I took almost a year and a half ago was a different one. Together with the two friends of mine (and you know, three crazy dudes from Russia -- Horsh, Fidor and Vusya -- are a pretty powerful combination when it comes to skunkworks) we started this porting project pretty much in our spare time. We had to battle Linux we had to battle glibc we had to battle gcc but it was great fun and we were doing something really useful. On top of that in two months we actually had a C compiler not only capable of bootstrapping itself but also passing about 80% of the most rigorous testsuite you could subject a piece of code to. At that point I just showed up in from of my boss and told him -- its time to ship it. Much to his credit he was very supportive and helped me a lot with everything. If it weren't for him our coming out of the closet during LinuxWorld in San Francisco probably should have never ever happened.