MashedPotato Tech

­"Whose turn is it to prep the JavaCar demo?" I asked my colleague. As I suspected, the answer was, "Yours!" However, I wasn't too disappointed, as I was happy to show off what my team at Sun Microsystems Labs had built. Our JavaCar was well ahead of its time—a vehicle testbed for in-car networking, telematics, and infotainment, all before those concepts existed in the mainstream. So, I set about carefully starting the demo, as well as using a spray bottle to give the vehicle a quick wipedown before showing the car to another set of visiting executives. As I was doing this, I suddenly thought back over the past six months of development—we were a three-person team inside of the research organization, yet we'd garnered code contributions from over 15 different individuals throughout multiple teams in the company to make this demo a reality. While I didn't think too much more about it that day, that project had propelled me into a career in open so...

My two biggest dreams growing up were to be either a firefighter or a space explorer. Though I didn’t get to do either of those things, I satisfy the former via being a volunteer in prevention with Cal Fire, California’s state fire department, and the latter by reading everything I can get my hands on about space—both fiction and non-fiction. I recently picked up Col. Chris Hadfield’s book about life as an astronaut, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth , and began reading it during one of my international trips to Asia. Besides being a fascinating read (I highly recommend it), it has also been enlightening as I think about how I can do my own job better and counsel internal developers and Samsung as a whole on doing a better job in open source. Aim to be a zero In chapter 9 of the book, Hadfield writes: “In any new situation…you will almost certainly be viewed in one of three ways. As a minus one: actively harmful, someone who creates problems. Or as a zero: your impact is ...