New Adventures (so long Sun, hello Extension)!

It has been a long time since I blogged about anything, but with new events that have happened recently, I figured now was as good a time as any!

On January 29th, 2010, I was laid off from Sun Microsystems, where I enjoyed an almost 13 year career. Being bought out by Oracle was going to be an exciting time. I thought we (or I) were going to see a resurgence of the Sun of old. It was a great adventure, and I learned quite a lot, as well as worked with a number great of people, so it was sad to leave.

I did a great number of things while in Sun, including working on the installation environment for Solaris 8 and Solaris 9, creating the installation kiosk for CD0, co-founding the BigAdmin portal (which lived in the installation kiosk, and which stayed with me for 10 years, up until my last day), worked on the sysid suite of tools, ereg, iChange jumpstart application, customized CMS applications and more.

But that being said, I am ready for new challenges and to move onto something new.

On February 22, 2010, I started working for a new company, Extension, Inc., which is developing a health-care communication appliance that has a lot of potential. Sounds very challenging, and involves a lot of research and development which will result in a very compelling product in a field that is very open to new technology right now.

Being in Sun for so many years, I am very used to working under pressure, and getting to develop in some of the latest technologies, and that will continue in my new role (as Sr. Software Engineer), which I am very grateful for.

My new role will involve a lot of Java/JEE development, utilizing Glassfish 3 (awesome!) as well as digging into Ruby/JRuby, and building on the Ubuntu platform to begin with.

So, my first entries here will involve the work I have been doing and will be doing on converting an existing Rails application to work inside of a JRuby container inside of Glassfish 3, the trials involved in that, converting ruby components into OSGi compliant Java modules, and building a solid communication platform for many different devices from within a health-care environment.