Yesterday afternoon, Hackweek III was running on full throttle, suddenly Jeff Jaffe, the CTO of Novell, stepped into our office. No meeting appointment, no big words, just a “What are you guys working on in Hackweek?”. Well, everybody who ever was working as an employee might understand that having the boss of the boss of the boss stepping into the office spontanously can be a bit exiting, but that is just the first two seconds. I think it is cool if executives do that.
In the company I worked before S.u.S.E. the owner always visited us on friday afternoons and sat on the developers desk. He was somehow geeky and was simply interested in tech talk. That made me nervous in the beginning, but later it was fun and informing. It was a great opportunity to present good ideas or concerns and on the other hand he gave a lot of first hand information what customers say, how the fairs went etc. In this kind of situation we convinced him finally that our under-cover Linux port of our solaris based product was way better for all customers than the Windows version most customers (and thus the executives) asked for.
I was hacking on my KDE application Kraft when Jeff asked, which is certainly not for the enterprise market. But given that applications are the key to pull people to linux we agreed that it is a cool Hackweek project 😉 I forgot to ask him what he is hacking on 🙂
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In hack week we don’t work on our regular projects, but we do what interests us.
Jeff’s project for hack week is to avoid scheduled meetings and learn what the SUSE team is working on during hack week.
Jeff visited us in Prague too. 🙂