Tim Bray mentions in his blog that he attended a meeting of Sun’s Distinguished Engineers this week. As the organizer of that meeting, I was interested in his observations. One of the not-so-subtle reasons that I asked Tim to present was that I’d really like more of the DEs to start blogging: I think that they have a lot of interesting stuff to say. Only a few of us do right now – James, Eduardo, Jim, Dick, myself….
As Tim noted, getting to be a DE involves peer review, and many people assume that this means we’re really some kind of clique or a club. Nothing could be further from the truth. Technically we’re all over the map, from sub-atomic physics to petascale supercomputers, from the mathematics of component failure to the poetry of programming. Some of us have a broad technological or business perspective, others are wholly focussed on our particular area of specialization. Some are interested in talking about process, organizations, and leadership; others want to stick to “hard” engineering. And some are unfailingly courteous, while others are (let’s face it) arrogant SOBs. The two things that unite us are a passion for engineering, and a passion for Sun. It’s an amazing place to be (I joined in 1985) and it’s a privilege to work with such a team – DEs and everyone else.
As you might imagine, putting together a conference program for that crowd is something of a challenge. But we still had a good time, and got a lot done.