Thursday September 29, 2005

Doing the 'Elvis has left the building' routine

Tomorrow, Friday September 30th, is my last day at Sun. It has been 8.47 years, by far an all time record, including personal relationships. First it was Sun IT, then eCommerce and finally Portal, 100% Java almost from the beginning, JDK 1.1 was just out from the oven, my first program was a notepad using AWT, the second one was a peer to peer chatting room using RMI (Atul still makes fun of me saying 'Come see, did some Java') , third one was a mini application server based on RMI as well, they even made me file a patent on it. I've been lucky to work under the *protection* of Mita, Abhay and Yee and with tons of great engineers, many of them become very good friends in the process, I went all the way to India for the wedding of one of them and to the dreadful land of Texas for the termination (yes, got married as well) of another. With JSR168, WSRP and ROME I've got the chance to work, learn and argue with sharp people from all over. Earlier this year I've been working in India for a few months, a truly fantastic experience, the people, the place; the low-point was my failed attempt of convincing Chandra, the driver, to call me 'Alejandro' instead of 'Sir', he would just reply with a 'Yes Sir' to my requests.

What I'm trying to say is that regardless of my reasons for leaving, putting all things in the scale, it tips all the way to IT WAS GREAT, IT WAS FUN.

So, what's next for me? My belongings are in storage, they've been there since March, got a ticket for next week, a small backpack, a camera, a diving computer and about 4 months to spend in Southeast Asia.

I guess this will be the last entry in this blog. I'll show up somewhere else when I'm back.

For sure ROME will be well taken care of while I'm gone. And in the case of JSR168 NEXT, I hope a 'Things to Do in Denver When You Are Dead' happens soon.

Cheers.

Tucu (tucu0[THE FUNNY a]yahoo.com)

Sunday June 06, 2004

The changing images on the top left corner of the page

Snapshots from some of my trips.

Making them change randomly when page loads. Some dummy javascript.

Here you have a set of nine:

To blog or not to blog

It has been a dilemma for me. I wouldn't say I'm much of a blogger. I've tried a few times before but I've given up. It takes time [trying] to do it well. We'll see how it goes this time.

Tucu WHO?

I've been with Sun since early 97 and these days I work in the Sun Portal Server engineering team on some collaboration initiatives.

Why you may have heard my name ...

Does JSR168 JavaTM Portlet Specification ring a bell? I was one of the specification co-leads. As spec-lead I should have to take much of the blame. But I'm not alone there, I have a co-lead (Stefan Hepper) and a whole Expert Group to share it with, community effort I'd say. Doing JSR168 was a great experience. I've got to work with many sharp folks from different companies. I had to learn some political skills. I had fun working on the spec and I'd say I was not alone. We even managed to have an Expert Group face to face meeting in Breckenridge (CO) in January (you connect the dots :). Or Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP)? I've participated on the doings of WSRP specification as well. Some more blame to take. I've met more smart people. I've learned other political skills (it's a complete different ball game when you are not the captain). We had fun there too. After a face to face in Grenoble (France) I've wandered through Pais Catar (France southwest) for a few days.

In a previous life I've worked in the iPlanet eCommerce division, in the iMM (iPlanet Market Maker) product designing and implementing a multi-dimensional spot exchange (sounds cool, doesn't it?). Before that I was in Sun IT doing reusable components in Java, many of them are part of today's Sun internal IT applications. Rewinding a little more, I was living in Buenos Aires, where I've worked for Sybar (Sybase Argentinean Distributor back then) doing technical support, presales support, consulting and some management. I'm sure there are still Sybase customers down there that have fliers with my picture offering some mony in exchange of my whereabouts. And I believe the Argentinean customs MARIA system is still using some C/C++ libraries and UI framework I did for them (through SIF America) back in 93.