Ramblings of an ancient Software Engineer

Between 2003 and 2009, I used to blog fairly often, particularly about Java and Oracle / JDeveloper related things, but also a lot of randomness too. When I started working for Google in 2008, my blogging output declined dramatically, possibly because blogs weren’t what they used to be, but mainly because I began actually having a life outside of work :)

I was reading over some of these older blogs in a fit of procrastination during the 2019 holidays. They’re an interesting snapshot from one particular dimension of a time long gone by. I’d like to start writing more next year, so I thought I’d start by resurrecting all of this old content on Medium.

I blogged in four primary places: from 2003–4, I used Radio Weblog. In 2004, I launched an Oracle Employee blog hosting and aggregation site called Orablogs, and mostly posted there using Movable Type. In 2006, Oracle launched a blogging platform for employees. I moved to this site along with most Oracle employees at that time. Finally, in 2007 I started a parallel blog on Blogger, which I maintained through and slightly after the time I left Oracle for Google.

Some of the content is still available on the web, albeit with messed up formatting in various ways. The Oracle corporate blogging content evaporated as soon as I left Oracle (a lesson if ever there was one), but in any event probably would have moved by now anyway. Wayback Machine and a bunch of Google Drive backup archives were very useful in resurrecting all of this content.

So without further ado, I’ll begin in drips and drabs publishing this ancient content. Most of the posts have commentary from the modern day me with context and some followups and modern observations. I’ve no idea who would want to read this stuff, but I’ve been enjoying resurrecting ancient stuff recently, so enjoy!