May, 22 2003

There’s something satisfying about shipping a well-written class fronted with an elegant interface. Makes me proud. It’s a pity code is electronic, otherwise I could wrap our library in a tasteful recycled paper, tied with an understated ribbon and sporting a small card that says:

Here at [insert organisation], we are proud of our coding products. Our developers use only the purest 7-bit ASCII characters, typed by hand, arranged in compliance with the Java Language Specification and checked with a modern compiler. We hope you enjoy programming with this class.

OK, so I was brave and offered the world a free beer in exchange for being sociable. It turned out to be a short, sharp lesson in how small the world is. There were three takers:

• Mike Cannon-Brookes from Atlassian. Charles and I went and met Mike, Scott and the gang at their new(-ish) offices. They have a world map on which they place a dot for each JIRA sale, and the world is going dotty. Turns out that I had already met Mike—his brother in law, Andrew, is a close friend, and Mike’s niece is my god-daughter.

• Daniel Bradby—of Hibernate Eclipse plugin fame. Daniel actually works in the Melbourne office of the same company that I work for, but he saw my offer on the blog so I’m counting him in.

• Oliver Burn, who is the person most responsible for Checkstyle. Oliver and I almost worked together at one of my previous employers. He left six months before I joined. Oliver and I met with Malcolm Edgar, who had also worked at the same place.

Topics of conversation varied from compiling Java in a pub with an iPod and two Apple PowerBooks, through to how the Collins class submarine’s project schedule was managed. Also talked about enterprise architectures, Python and web services. Learnt a lot, made and renewed acquaintances, had a lot of fun. Must put out the offer again in a few months time—maybe I’ll even meet someone I don’t already know.

Postscript: Karen (my wife) mentioned all this activity to our friend James on the weekend. He said, “Oh, that was you?”. James had been travelling in the great Aussie outback over the last few weeks. While passing through Tenterfield he heard a story about some guy who was offering “free beer and a chat” on the radio. No doubt TripleJ paid their usual great amount of respect to the subject. If anybody can confirm this little story or add more detail, I’d be grateful.