How EJBGen, TestNG and ...Android happened

An airhacks.fm conversation with Cedric Beust (@cbeust) about:

Apple II was the first love, building an Apple II emulator, the C64 domination, starting with Basic, then switching to 6502 assembly, cracking games for fun, learning Pascal, starting to study Math because Computer Science was not available, working as administrator at school, switching to Amiga 1000 then Amiga 2000, joining the demo scene, the impact of remote applications as PhD, working with C++ and CORBA, C++ language involvement, meeting Bjaerne Stroustroup, evolving a language is hard, starting with Java 1996, joining Sun Labs in 1998, implementing "persona" at Sun Labs with Java, Sun was not the right place to work with Java, applying at Imprise to work on Borland Application Server, meeting the WebLogic developers at a party, joining WebLogic, C++ was hard to work with, Java was a fresh air, the EJB container team was 10 developers, writing EJBGen, working on Java annotations, the relation between EJBGen and xdoclet, the Attribute Oriented Programming with XDoclet, the metadata should be in the near of Java code, joining the JCP to create Java Annotations, starting at Google to work with Adwords, motivated by shortcomings of JUnit, TestNG was created in 2004, WebLogic vs. WebSphere, tests should depend on each other, TestNG was an exploration of a modern framework, Google's mobile team were 5 people in 2005, starting a mobile Gmail project at Google on J2ME, Java Mobile, Google Android's acquisition, working with Andy Rubin to develop a Java-based OS, a team of 5 developers started to build Android, Android was strategic for Larry Page, users should be in power-this was the spirit of Android, Android development was "Top Secret", leaving Google to join a startup, building internal tools for supervision at LinkedIn, creating a calendar assistant at a startup, starting as "firefighter" at Yahoo in Java space, starting okta, okta is an "universal" SSO, implementing SSO across companies at okta, okta's backend is written in Java

Cedric Beust on twitter: @cbeust, Cedric's blog