Work, JavaOne, etc.

It seems some folks have been wondering where I've gone. Sorry for the lack of updates; work's been nutty.

I've spent the past two weeks or so working on my first real project, analyzing the performance of some of our systems here. It's been fun: part programming, part statistical analysis, part data visualization and report writing. Right up my alley, really, though I'm glad it's winding down.

I spent much of last week at JavaOne, working our booth. It was a lot of fun -- it got me into the city, which I haven't been able to do nearly as much as I've wanted to, and I got to show off some of our neat tech. Met a lot of interesting people.

It felt sort of appropriate on some level. A year ago next week, I approached Google on a lark, at this very conference. I was thrilled to be invited out to dinner with a bunch of them, where I met luminaries in the field who are now my much-respected coworkers. I also met Brian Goetz, who wound up soliciting my help with a pre-publication review of his excellent book.

Now, at dinner a year later, I was doing the inviting and helping to host, rubbing elbows with some of the same people, and some new ones. Brian's book has been released, and was the best-selling book at JavaOne.

Of course, I was still the same opinionated pedant, giving the Java team crap. (They're used to it by now, I suspect.)

At the conference, I ran into a few of my old coworkers from Choice. They seemed to be doing well. Things seem to have come full circle, in a sense.


On Saturday, Jeannette and I went up into San Francisco to hang out with Morgan. It was awfully nice being in the city, but I still don't think I could live there. We hung out with some of her tech-industry friends, and three times in one day I got the same line:

"Yeah, Google seems nice, if you like that sort of big-corporation culture."

*cough*

I've worked for big corporations. I'm not sure what Google they're talking about, but I think we have a disagreement in terms. :-)