Still a bit proud

Looking at Steve Muench's blog with its screenshot of JDeveloper 11g production makes me feel a little bit proud of what we built. Somehow I left Oracle with the feeling that I hadn't been very productive for a while, but seeing what Steve posted reminded me that the team really poured a lot of stuff into 11g.

Just visually from the screenshot, you can see the new look and feel I implemented based on a design from our talented visual design team. It got a lot of flak (experience is teaching me that fear or dislike of change is a very common trait), but apart from being unbelievably blue, I think it's quite attractive.

Also shown in the screenshot is quick search (which, honestly, we always referred to internally as "Google-like search". Hehe). This was something I wanted and so hacked together on a lazy afternoon without any kind of design or project plan while we were supposed to be in bug fixing mode. Despite its birth, it somehow made it into the final product in a very visible way. A very talented member of the team (Neil) did some fantastic work improving the visual design of the component while I was buried under classloading related tasks. One of the things I loved about the JDev team in the early days was the freedom to do this kind of innovation. Although that flexibility to innovate had been almost entirely crushed by the time I left, you could sometimes still get away with it and succeed.

Finally, Steve blogs elsewhere about log window search, which people begged and begged for until we finally relented and I was assigned the task late in the day.

I'm still very proud of these things, and even prouder of all the other innovations my old team implemented.