The Rave Room

WARNING: This blog entry was imported from my old blog on blogs.sun.com (which used different blogging software), so formatting and links may not be correct.

Part of the Rave room, taken on Marco's cell phone yesterday.

Roumen, one of the NetBeans engineers in Prague,
blogged
about his trip
to the U.S. For JavaOne, and mentioned that he's heard about the
infamous Rave room here in Menlo Park:

I've heard that there is some special huge office with 12 Creator developers on one place and it's interesting to see how they work together (I cannot imagine how this works, I need relative silence to be able to work efficiently).

Rave was the project name for the tool that eventually was named
Sun Java Studio Creator. When we started out, we had an extremely
aggressive schedule. (Some things never change...)
The project was unlike any I had worked in, or even heard about,
at Sun before. We had a small, very focused team that worked
like a small startup company. The team has since grown, but
we still hold on to some of the core aspects started two and
a half years ago.

The team is too large to fit in the Rave room now. But I still
spend all my office time there. In fact, I'm one of those Sun
engineers who have given up their regular offices. I figured
it was time to do that when I hadn't been in it for over a year!
I come in to the office twice a week, and on the other two
(actually, four :) I work at home.

My corner. Back off! Hey, who took my good chair?

When I'm in the office,
I sit in my Corner Office. This is a spot I've had since the
very beginning, so nobody dares to challenge me for it...
In the picture, you can see a Viking guarding my corner,
and the Dukie award I got two years ago for my

demo trouble
.

You may wonder how one can get any work done surrounded by
so many people. The key to that is that most of us
only work there twice a week. Those are days when you
schedule meetings, or work out technical issues on one of
the boards, or just get the pulse of the product and find
out what's going on by talking to people or overhearing
conversations. Of course there have been times when I need
to get some coding done at the last minute for a milestone build.
That's when I wear my noise cancelling head phones and
crank up some suitable coding music to drown out the
background conversations. Those who want peace and quiet
tend to disappear, probably to their offices, or for those
like me without one, to one of the flexible offices.

Having a shared space like this makes it easier to have
a team culture. For example, we have various artifacts
spread throughout the room - such as early marketing
posters, or award trophies and diplomas. There's even
a picture on the wall from the JavaOne 2003 keynote demo
when the product was launched. And, when we get near
a code freeze, we write the number of days left until
code freeze on the door.

Speaking of that, let me go see how many days we
have left...

<voice type="panic" pitch="high" volume="high" >AAAAAAARGH!<voice>