Last Day at TIBCO

Today was my last day at TIBCO Software. In two weeks I will be joining Fog Creek Software, and while I wish I could work in their wonderful office on Manhattan island, I will instead be working from home and looking out my window onto Pasadena. I suspect that once winter starts, the wishing will point the other direction.

I am proud of my time at TIBCO, while I was there I:

  • Unified the user interfaces for their enterprise integration products into a single framework called Designer. Designer has been in production for over 10 years, and has not had a group focused on its maintenance for at least 6 of those. Even while it was under active development, Designer had very very low support costs.
  • Designed and lead development of the user interface for their popular graphical programming environment called BusinessWorks. BusinessWorks, as designed ten years ago, is still in production and is responsible for a large chunk of revenue for TIBCO
  • Demonstrated BusinessWorks running in Eclipse, around six years ago, only to have that project scuttled. The production release of BW still runs on Designer, and is still waiting an update.
  • Designed and implemented a system for deploying configurations to hundreds, possibly thousands, of messaging clients
  • Built and productized one of the first single page web applications at TIBCO based on JQuery
  • Built a JNI-based Java API providing a minimal cost on top of the C library underneath and resulting in sub-millisecond messaging in Java

I think that is a pretty good record for twelve years, especially considering that I was a remote worker for eleven of those years, and when you consider that I also published a book, earned a PhD and a 3rd Degree Blackbelt in that time. For my reward, I got a pretty good salary, a few good bonuses, some stock and I met some nice people.

So long TIBCO.