Working at Ximian

What is Ximian?

An awesome company whose purpose was to write software for the Linux desktop, specifically GNOME.

Products

Evolution

Red Carpet

Ximian Desktop

Mono

Where is Ximian Today?

Ximian was bought by Novell in August of 2003.

Ximian branding has been disolved into Novell and is no longer used.

How Did I Get There?

GNOME Documentation Project

A little assertiveness

Work Environment

3 adjectives: laid-back, informal, friendly

What Tools Did Ximian Use?

Distribution – Mostly Red Hat

Text Editor – Mostly emacs

Email Client – Evolution

In sum: Open source pretty much everywhere

The Web Sites

Stored in CVS

Linux servers

2 levels of staging (stage and stage-final)

PHP based

ximian.com 3.0 used smarty

Quality Assurance

Bugzilla bug tracking

Tons of dog fooding (beta and nightly)

VERY public betas

The Good Parts

The People

Technology

Pizza Every Friday and Free Drinks All Week Long

The Rough Parts

Microsoft could stomp us

The Rough Parts (Cont'd)

We were a dot com company

We were an open source company

The Rough Parts (Cont'd)

Chema Celorio

Ettore Perazzoli

Overall Impressions

Fun

Greatest opportunity of my life

Wouldn't trade it for the world

Kevin Breit

2005-07-31T23:10:55