Half a year at Sun

Tomorrow I will be working at Sun for one half year already 🙂 This is an important milestone to me for several reasons.

(More than) Half a year ago, I got this opportunity to get a job at Sun. Given the circumstances, this was surely the last chance to do that :-). Back then, some folks thought I was completely freaked out to give up a relatively safe job for a relatively … adventurous job, given the global recession, the upcoming merger with Oracle etc. But inside myself I felt that this would be just the right move, so I just did it. After all I almost always tend to prefer adventure over safety. Looking back I must say it was one of the best things I ever did.

I had a great first week in San Francisco, attending and talking at JavaOne, which is about the best start for a job that you could think of 🙂 After that I had two great weeks at the east coast, and started working with my team. The following couple of weeks I spent home, as I’m 100% working from home, which is cool. I learned tons of new stuff, hacking on the Java plugin, on server stuff and other things. It’s interesting that once I managed to wrap my head around this stuff, it even became good fun, even though I was really more the graphics, GUI and VM guy before. I had a good healthy crisis some weeks ago, got out of that with lots of fresh energy, with help and good advice from some really nice people (you know who you are).

The best thing about all this is that I feel like I am learning and growing again, something that I was kinda missing before. I think I’ll open a bottle of Guiness now and celebrate a little and say cheers!

New blog

I moved my blog to https://rkennke.wordpress.com. I don’t want to maintain my own server anymore, keep it uptodate, pay its bills etc, just for the sake of running a blog and email. The domain and email address will remain intact though. If you read this message, are already reading the new blog and don’t need to do anything 🙂

Hypertree Demo

I put together a small demo based on hypertree.

It only shows some random fluff, but it gets over how this guy works. Also, it’s quite slow and ugly. But it should make the Xebece app much more fun to use. Check out the screenshots (done with a different much less fun graph renderer).