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Marketing the Code: why opensource matters

Being an opensource product does not mean you can ignore marketing. If you think about your code from the market perspective, your target audience is probably the community, being it users, developers, testers, or those writing FAQs and documentation.

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May 15, 2006 EN, Opensource, Uncategorized

Software Sustaining: refresh your mind

I have recently started to work for SUN Microsystems as a sustaining engineer. Sustaining as a verb means maintaining a released version of some product, which does not probably sound that much appealing as it really is. Let me say what I have found during my first months of that increadible work:

• Developers are always at the bleeding edge, they do not care about users, and the only option they recommend you most of the time is to upgrade to the new version of a product, that is better, faster, with more features, …, and of course more bugs. It is worth pointing out that the upgrade process is never as simple as typing:
  # apt-get update && apt-get -yu dist-upgrade.
• You are seeing things that were never meant to be seen again (also known as CZ: kostra ve skříni).
• You are faced with all tons of the latest-and-greatest technology (read: Java + XML + ORM + [insert your favorite enterprise standard]) that actually never simplified any work, but thanx to which you are very well paid because there are less and less people who can orient in all that mess.
• You think more and more about software usability and consider buying yourself a Mac computer.
• You end up frequently at The Daily WTF, but this time you are not laughing as you did before. The daily WTF experience became your daily bread.

Having been working as a software designer and developer since the beginning of my career, I really love the sustaining work because it is almost endlessly refreshing. See you at The Daily WTF.

May 15, 2006 EN, Life at SUN, Uncategorized

Good Bye S.W.A.C.

After four years of thought-provoking collaboration, the only thing that remains to be said is…

for colleague in $(cat swac_members.txt) ; do
    echo "Thank You $colleague" ;
done

Some more pictures from the final party can be found here.

March 6, 2006 EN, Uncategorized