Blogging Roller

So far, my first week has been an absolute blast. I've barely had time to catch my breath and, as you can see, no time to blog. I have a little free time tonight, so I'll give you an update.

Monday started out with the standard new employee orientation meeting at the Santa Clara campus. I skipped out on the new employee lunch to head back up to Menlo Park to spend the afternoon in meetings talking about Roller enhancements, blogging, and some interesting open source issues. My new manager, Will Snow, and others have put together an extensive and well thought-out list of Roller enhancements that I hope to get into our JIRA instance as soon as possible. Some are duplicates of existing RFEs, but I'll sort that out. At the top of the list are, as you might expect, performance and stability. Moving to 0.9.9 will be a big help, but more work needs to be done. After we wrapped up the meetings, I headed down to Mountain View for a nice dinner at the Tied House with Tim Bray, Danese Cooper, Zak Greant, Simon Phipps, and Stefan Taxhet.

Tuesday was devoted to Sun's internal Open Source Summit which was just awesome. I really glad I started this week instead of next, because I would have hated to have missed the summit. Representatives from all of the open source projects around Sun were there to bring everybody up to date on status and future plans. On top of that, there were a bunch of interesting guest speakers like Doc Searls, James Duncan Davidson, Brian Belhendorf, Rael Dornfest, Zak Greant, and others. In the evening, I had a great time talking with Patrick Chanezon and Alejandro Abdelnur about Sun and Rome and politics and all sorts of vaguely related things.

Wednesday morning, we had yet another meeting to talk Roller and blogging, but this time, in front of a larger audience that included... gasp... James Gosling himself. I think I managed to keep my cool pretty well. Then Jonathan Schwartz stopped by to say hi and to tell some interesting stories about the impact of blogs on customers, employees, and analysts. How cool is that! (I'm not a name dropper, noooooo, not me.) Wednesday afternoon, we met to talk features and blogging technologies again. Sounds like a lot of meetings, doesn't it. Generally speaking, meetings suck, but I haven't had this much fun at work in years.

Tomorrow things should settle down a bit and I'll get a chance to get hooked up to the network, learn how to us the Sun web, and maybe even get started on some of those RFEs. Sorry about the lack of links in this entry, but it is well past my bedtime. I'll have to get to that tomorrow. G'gite.