A team-building exercise at the Open Solaris Developers’ Summit, 2008. Part of the Go Games package is that you get access to all the photos and video shot during the game. So I had a little fun with it…
Here’s the full gallery of photos from the game:
After the general party at Moscone Center (footage to come), there was a somewhat smaller party at a nearby bar/restaurant.
We had quite a bit to celebrate – and quite a bit to celebrate it with (above)!
A number of cool non-Sun people were present, including ^ Jay Edwards (one of the handful of engineers who runs one of my favorite online services, Twitter). I had to have a photo taken with him, to impress all my Italian twithead friends.
^ Jesse Silver, who had done such a fantastic job organizing the Developers’ Summit, and Silona Bonewald, whom I’ll be seeing more of at next week’s Grid & Cluster conference. Silona is wearing our trendy green and blue opensolaris wristbands.
^ Jim Huges unites opensolaris (temporary tattoo logo on his forehead) with MySQL’s dolphin mascot. Hey, I didn’t get one of those! (Nor did I get one of the very cool “Build your community” t-shirts from CommunityOne, wah! But I do have two different opensolaris t-shirts.)
Jeff Bonwick and Jim play an intense game of pool.
I’m attending the OpenSolaris Developers’ Summit, held in Santa Cruz, CA, May 3-4, 2008. I’ve been working with and participating in various online communities for a long time, but I’m new to this one, and have a lot to learn about the people, technologies, history, present realities, and possible futures. This weekend is an excellent opportunity to start filling in some of those gaps.
^ top: Tim Cramer and Jim Walker
Continue reading The OpenSolaris Developers’ SummitAfter a busy weekend at the OpenSolaris Developers’ Summit in Santa Cruz, Lynn, Jeff, and I drove up California’s gorgeous Highway 1 to San Francisco to attend CommunityOne.
The keynote session was kicked off by Ian Murdock, who talked about open source, with help from Jonathan and illustrations from Hugh McLeod.
[dead video link removed]
This was all by way of introducing opensolaris 2008.05.
Rich Green, Jim Hughes, and Jeff Bonwick went all Wile E. Coyote on some disk drives to prove the resilience of the ZFS file system (note the name on the anvil).
I spent most of the afternoon filming sessions (footage which will be publicly available as soon as I have time to edit it) and then… it was time to party!
I must be the perfect modern employee. In my 20+ years of working life, I have rarely had an office or even a cubicle to call my own, and haven’t particularly wanted or missed one.
In the three-room apartment that was our home in Milan for 13 years, my workspace (when I wasn’t in a shared office) was a corner of our bedroom. The temporary cubes I was assigned on my visits to Silicon Valley were a comparative luxury!
But, even in cramped conditions, working at home had advantages: if my daughter was sick and had to stay home from school, or if public transport was on strike (as happens frequently in Italy) and I couldn’t get to the office, it just didn’t matter. As long as I had a computer and an Internet connection, I could be productive wherever I was.
I began travelling extensively for work around 1994, so I always had a laptop (in addition to or instead of a desktop computer), and was accustomed to working anywhere, anytime.
This became a standing family joke: we would stage pictures of me working in unlikely places: on a P&O ferry from Calais to Dover, at the top of a snowy Alp, on a beach recliner in Martinique.
I did not actually work in any of those places – I do know how to take a vacation. But not being tied to a desk meant that I could work, when I chose, anywhere in the world. I didn’t have to take vacation time to be present at the obligatory family holidays halfway across Italy: I could spend time with the family and still get my work done.
In our new home in Lecco, I have a small home office with a spectacular view – who needs a corporate corner office?
But that’s not enough to keep me in one place. My colleagues at Sun don’t much care where I am physically located (and are scattered all over the world themselves, both in Sun offices and at home), so I can pick up my laptop and go wherever I want to. With my Sun badge, I can waltz into any Sun office in the world and use a desk and high-speed Internet – but I don’t have to.
Right now I’m in India, visiting my daughter at my old school. Thanks to the hospitality of a classmate, I’m in a comfortable home with a more-than-decent Internet connection. I can even use Skype to keep in touch with my colleagues. The only thing lacking is a desk, but, hey, I’ve still got a lap.
And the view ain’t too shabby, either.
How about you? Are you ready to give up a cube or office?
