End of Series Finale

Monday 6th September marks the start of my last week at Oracle. But then I’ve never thought of myself as working for Oracle, never wanted to work for them. So it’s my last week at Sun Microsystems. Do you know I’ve hardly talked to anyone at Oracle who didn’t come over with Sun.

I think Zeno was right though, I just keep halving the time until I leave and each half feels as long as the bit just halved. I creep asymptotically towards leaving.

On the off-chance that I do get there, my last day is officially Thursday 9th September 2010 but I have that as vacation.

I leave behind friends, colleagues and a strange bunch of others that I obviously never really understood. Listening to a podcast today with Solaris heavyweights Dan Roberts, Chris Armes and Bill Nesheim talking about SPARC without mentioning the name “Sun Microsystems”, it’s like they were a separate entity that were accommodated by Sun for a while and now are accommodated by Oracle. Boy are they in for a surprise.

Maybe this is just an attempt at a sound byte, but I do believe that the world was a better place with Sun Microsystems in it. Shame on those that wrecked it. I sent Jonathan Schwartz an email on the day that the acquisition was announced, I told him that he was to blame, that he had destroyed everything that we had built. I should have called him ‘a Scoundrel’. He never replied to my email, hopefully it was lost in a flood of similar.

I have been bitter about the acquisition, but I’m not able to sustain such feelings for long. I hope that all the Sun Microsystems people that remain will be treated better than they have been so far, I wish Oracle every success in their plans to make lots of money (seemingly their mission statement)… OK, still bitter then, it’s better but won’t be fully gone until I leave.

As for Java, I have my Duke plush and he’ll go wherever I go. I’ve not been completely loyal to him over the years but I keep coming back to him. Duke doesn’t care about acquisitions and law suits, he’s above all that.

So that just leaves me to say goodbye to my friends at Sun and farewell to all of my colleagues. We did great things at Sun and I have many fond memories to take away with me. The spirit of Sun Microsystems lives on in all Sun Alumni everywhere.

Starting over

My original blog is at http://blogs.sun.com/mandy

I originally set out to solve the kind of issues that everyone hits when trying to build and deploy F/LOSS applications on esoteric platforms such as OpenSolaris. It would have worked better if OpenSolaris were more successful, but also and with hindsight, it would have been better to work harder to make it so that these problems never occurred in the first place. That would involve either changing OpenSolaris or changing the upstream application. OpenSolaris integration processes are long-winded and it’s not always easy to convince upstream communities to integrate fixes for minority platforms.  In the end I often took the easier route of “hey, when you hit this issue do this…” and there’s no way that that’s optimal for anyone. BTW: I can’t thank the Ruby, lighttpd and EventMachine folks enough for all the support they’ve given us.

Anyway, that’s all in the past. I really feel the need to have a blog that’s independent of my employer and I aim to use it to it’s maximum. I won’t blog trivia as I can do that with Twitter (@tekgrrl) – and no that’s not all that Twitter is good for – but I have some amazing opportunities and some ridiculously scary plans in the pipeline and I’d be foolish not to share them with whoever cares to listen.