April, 2009


15
Apr 09

How to sneak easter eggs past the pointy haired boss

I’m part of a small team that is developing a cool Java product. We’ve been afloat for more than a year and we’re doing better every month. We’ve grown quite a bit during this time. There used to be only one developer, then I joined the team and now we already have 4 devs.

Until now we’ve got away with most of the jokes we’ve pulled but we have matured over the period and we’re not the same young naive happy hackers anymore (right!). We still do like to throw a joke in every now and then.

We released a XML configuration file schema with our last product release and we had to pick a schema location for that. Remembering the Mozilla Ghostbusters reference we also had to reference something. And so we did.

But last week we got an email from our pointy haired boss. He had made a memo with 5 points about the documentation we have. The last point read: Why is there an alderaan in the namespace? It should be our product name!

I guess this marks a landmark in our small team, we’re not small anymore and we’ll have to figure out a way to keep the pointy haired occupied with something (Google Analytics usually does the trick). Luckily for us, we could still play the founder card, but later we may not be so lucky. What jokes have you managed to sneak by your boss and how did you hide them?

PS. We did not have to change our schema but it came quite close.


1
Apr 09

Microsoft acquires ZeroTurnaround for undisclosed amount

ZeroTurnaround Ltd., a developer of Java development productivity tools, announced today that it has been acquired by Microsoft Corp. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. ZeroTurnaround will stop any further developments of JavaRebel and JSPWeaver and will buy back all the licenses sold so far.

“The deal fits with Microsoft’s strategy of migrating Java developers to the .NET platform and will increase the conversion rate greatly” said Alain Crozier, Corporate Vice President and CFO, from Sales, Marketing and Services Group of Microsoft Corp. “We saw ZeroTurnaround as a threat to our .NET development platform, enabling Java developers to be as productive as the developers on modern platforms. We had to put a stop to it.”

Rumours say that this can severly affect the IBM and SUN deal and will send Java development back as far as the Stone Age.