Rock on Kohsuke!
Term "Rock start programmer" is thrown around casually when discussing best software developers. But as with music, true stars are few and far between. While knowing the lifestyle can help, you got to have the chops, be able to influence and inspire others, and obviously deliver the goods to fill the stadiums, and data centers.
In Java enterprise programming world there are few more worthy of being called a rock star than Kohsuke Kawaguchi. List of projects he has single-handedly built is vast; list of projects he has contributed to immense, and his coding speed mighty fast (as confirmed by his use of term POTD, Project of the Day -- very very few individuals write sizable systems literally in a day!). It all makes you wonder whether he is actually a mere human being at all (maybe he's twin brother of Jon Skeet?!). For those not in the know, list of things he has authored or contributed to contains such programming pearls such as Multi-Schema Validator, Sun JAXB (v2) and JAX-WS implementations, Hudson, Maven, Glassfish, Xerces, Args4j, Com4j, and so on and on (for a more complete list, check out his profile at Ohloh; read and weep)
But to the point: it seems that mr. Kawaguchi is now moving on from sinking ship formerly known as Sun. This is not a sad thing per se (we all gotta move on at some point), nor unexpected -- steady stream of Sun people leaving Oracle has been and wil be going on for a while -- but it still feels strange. End of an era in a way; gradual shutting down of Sun brand. Image of a lonely cowboy riding against Sun settings (pun intended) comes to mind.
Anyway: rock on Kohsuke, onnea & lycka till! I look forward to seeing exactly what awesomeness you will come up with next!
