Friday June 24, 2005
The Rave Room
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I've heard that there is some special huge office with 12 Creator developers on one place and it's interesting to see how they work together (I cannot imagine how this works, I need relative silence to be able to work efficiently).Rave was the project name for the tool that eventually was named Sun Java Studio Creator. When we started out, we had an extremely aggressive schedule. (Some things never change...) The project was unlike any I had worked in, or even heard about, at Sun before. We had a small, very focused team that worked like a small startup company. The team has since grown, but we still hold on to some of the core aspects started two and a half years ago.
The team is too large to fit in the Rave room now. But I still spend all my office time there. In fact, I'm one of those Sun engineers who have given up their regular offices. I figured it was time to do that when I hadn't been in it for over a year! I come in to the office twice a week, and on the other two (actually, four :) I work at home.
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You may wonder how one can get any work done surrounded by so many people. The key to that is that most of us only work there twice a week. Those are days when you schedule meetings, or work out technical issues on one of the boards, or just get the pulse of the product and find out what's going on by talking to people or overhearing conversations. Of course there have been times when I need to get some coding done at the last minute for a milestone build. That's when I wear my noise cancelling head phones and crank up some suitable coding music to drown out the background conversations. Those who want peace and quiet tend to disappear, probably to their offices, or for those like me without one, to one of the flexible offices.
Having a shared space like this makes it easier to have a team culture. For example, we have various artifacts spread throughout the room - such as early marketing posters, or award trophies and diplomas. There's even a picture on the wall from the JavaOne 2003 keynote demo when the product was launched. And, when we get near a code freeze, we write the number of days left until code freeze on the door.
Speaking of that, let me go see how many days we
have left...
<voice type="panic" pitch="high" volume="high" >AAAAAAARGH!<voice>
Comments are closed for this entry.
I'm looking forward to see new version of Creator in action ;)
Posted by Lukas on June 28, 2005 at 01:03 AM PDT #