Of 5 Years of Open Source NetBeans, Netbeans Day (this Sunday!) and Leftover Chicken

Five years ago this week, we put the final touches on the initial NetBeans.org website. It wasn't as pretty as it is today, but watching it go live - and getting our first patch within a few hours of going live - was an incredible moment. If you're in the San Francisco area, you can come join us this Sunday for NetBeans Day (free, whether you're going to JavaONE or not).

If you work at Sun, the week before and the week of JavaONE is a week of complete and total insanity. In my case, I'm giving or co-presenting 5 talks in the next 5 days. Hectic, but a lot of fun. If you come to NetBeans day, I'll be doing a talk on building plug-ins; we've also got a hands-on lab at JavaONE where you'll actually build plug-ins.

And a lot of the NetBeans team is out here from Prague! It's great having friends in town, especially ones I've been missing quite a bit since I moved back to the U.S. in November, so I had the whole group over for southern fried chicken tonight (and cooked enough to be able to feed half of NetBeans day I think - anyone need chicken urgently in San Francisco? I can bring care packages up tomorrow).

NetBeans founder & architect Jarda Tulach; Radim Kubacki - performance team; Jan Chalupa - core team manager; Petr Hrebejk - trouble maker

If you're attending JavaONE and want to say hello, you can find me at NetBeans Day, the NetBeans Plug-Ins hands-on lab, Charles Ditzel's "10 reasons to use NetBeans" (we failed on this one...we couldn't keep it to just 10 :-)), and Jarda Tulach and my BOF on API design.

Clockwise from lower left: A bottle of Gatorade; Trung Duc Tran - Lead Architect; Radim Kubacki - performance; The Back of Jesse Glick's Head