Josh On Design

It's true. I'm leaving the Swing team. But don't worry, I'm not leaving Sun. I'm joining the Netbeans team, flying to Prague, moving to Oregon; oh, and I'm getting married!

I asked the wonderful woman named Jennifer Greenup to marry me last night, and amazingly she said yes! I will be moving up to beautiful Eugene, Oregon as soon as I get back from my trip.

So. After a great two years on the Swing team I've decided that the core libraries are pretty good and now we need to focus on tools. And what better tool is there than NetBeans. I will be working on Matisse, the app framework, and probably many other things. I think my Swing expertise will bring a lot to the team. I also think they will have a lot to teach me about tools and module design. Most importantly I will get to work on a tool that will have the biggest impact on Desktop Java. Flex, AJAX, and .NET are getting better and better. I think that NetBeans is the tool that will make building desktop Java apps as fast, reliable, and pretty as anything those other guys can build.

To start my new role off right Sun is sending me to Prague in the Czech Republic for four weeks. By the time you read this I will most likely be somewhere over the North Atlantic. Next week I will meet the team, show them what I've been doing for Swing and the SwingLabs, learn more about the innards of NetBeans, and of course spend some time enjoying central Europe.

Don't worry. My transition from Swing to NetBeans won't change anything here on Java.net. I will still be heavily involved in SwingLabs (particularly Painters and Animation) and will continue to work on my blog. It does mean my article writing and other projects will slow down (more on that in a future post).

As always I will have two blogs. One here for all of my Java and geeky writings, and my personal site at http://joshy.org, which exists primarily for my mom and dad to know where I've flown to this week. Since I have always had a desire to be a better photographer, both for the satisfaction of creating pretty photos and also to learn useful skills for designing attractive UIs, I have finally purchased a better camera. Last week I bought a new Nikon D50 SLR camera along with an amazingly crisp 50mm fixed lens. So far the photographs are great (there's a few here on my Flickr site) and I look forward to seeing what it can do in Prague.

So stay tuned. More great stuff is coming.

- Joshua

update

As requested, here's a recent photo of us picking out pumpkins. It was bright out!