My professional career has been spent at 2 companies, Eastman Kodak and D.O.Tech/directThought (rebranded 9 years in). At Kodak, I worked on blood analyzers (which they spun off to J&J), Photo CD (which was made obsolete by newer technologies) and Picture Maker, which is still going strong after N generations of hardware/software. At directThought, I had the joy of working with a lot of great people and working on some interesting projects. I worked on a Picture Maker-like kiosk/web-app/desktop app combination at Xerox. They even created a new division for that project called Pixography. We had XML templates that described printed products like greeting cards, calendars, business cards, brochures and photo books (to name a few). Java 2D rendered everything for print and preview. We had tight integration between the 3 different apps but that project died in its original form, but lived on in spirit in a custom production printing installation out on the west coast. After that, I worked on some enterprise apps for Pfizer, a payroll application for Paychex, then back to more custom apps for the services arm of Xerox. At that point, I got involved in Amazon Web Service and started kicking the tires on this new service called EC2. During that time, I started my most successful open source project called typica, which is still has a lot of users. After Xerox, I helped a number of customers run their apps on AWS’s infrastructure. We were fortunate enough to be come an inaugural AWS System Integrator. I was also asked to learn how to write apps for this hot new platform called the iPhone. I’ve had a couple of apps in the app store, and worked on a few more. I also got to go to the only WWDC where Steve didn’t deliver the keynote (because he was getting a new liver). All in all, a pretty great experience with may interesting technologies under my belt.
Now, I feel like it is time for a change. I’ve just accepted a job with Eucalyptus Systems! They build infrastructure that powers clouds. They have a lot of great people working there and I am looking forward to doing my part to help the company grow, if not flourish in this exciting space. Since they just started business last year, I can say I’m now part of a fast growing startup! Very excited!
Mickos’s new startup! That’s wonderful, congratulations!
Thanks, Onno! I’ll be around Rochester still. Maybe RAWSUG will morf into something more generally cloud related.
Good luck with the move to Eucalyptus, looks like they do cool stuff!