The NetBeans team tended to be focused on academic purity. Getting them to be a little more blue-collar was a challenge.
The nerves were so badly compressed that I had no feeling on the palm of my hand. I mean, you could have pounded a nail through my hand and I wouldn't have been able to feel it.
Some of these isolated applications that sit on one machine are a million lines of code. How do you deal with that? Most people have no way to wrap their head around it.
I had half my family that were farmers, and I was really pretty good at repairing farm equipment. There was certainly a period of time where I would have been happy to do that, just to be a farm equipment repairman in Dalemead, Alberta.
When you interview at Google, they don't tell you what the job is. You get hired for a pool and the reason they do it that way is they don't want outsiders learning their secrets in the interview process.
For us, the real goal is to make it so that the software ecosystem is as healthy as possible.
Simply put, when you have very large pieces of software, most of the tools look at the individual lines of code as text. It is often extremely powerful to look not at individual pieces of code but at a system as a whole.
When you have large systems, it becomes almost impossible to make even very simple changes.
The way that NetBeans is architected, it's not so much a tool as a tool environment.
If you look at our customers, our customers tend to be really high-end people who make big, sophisticated systems.
The data center side of the world is kind of like a solved problem, but you see interesting things happening on the edge with things like cell phones and embedded systems that are becoming really fascinating.
In C there are no data structures: there are pointers and pointer arithmetic. So you have a pointer into a data structure.
