I’ve been home from India and Vietnam for almost 10 days, so it’s time to finish up the small circle tour travel review.
Monday May 10, Bangalore to Hyderabad. Every time I’m in Bangalore I find something new and amazing. On our way from the Juniper Networks office to the (new) airport, we passed a statue of Ganesh that was easily three meters tall; we took a few detours onto some minor roads and had to jam on the brakes whle three monkeys crossed in front of our van. At the airport in Hyderabad, I grabbed bottle of water from a vending machine for 20 rupees (about 50 US cents) and enjoyed seeing the vegetarian McDonalds on the ground floor – McSpicy and McPaneer sandwiches bringing an American fast food flavor to Indian cuisine. I’m not sure this is a good thing; the food served in the Juniper cafeteria was just as fast, more “authentic” and probably a lot better tasting. Of all of the traits to export in American companies, “fast” isn’t necessarily the best.
Tuesday May 11, Java One Hyderabad. An early rehearsal time coupled with a random night’s sleep meant it was oatmeal for breakfast, washed down with iced coffee and lots of water. I always travel with a few instant oatmeal packets and a few Powerbars for those times when my logistics and the buffet schedules don’t coincide. The early rehearsal was well worth it, however, as I got the feel for an exceptionally wide and well-produced stage set. Java One was scheduled to start at 9:00, and at 8:58 the room was filled with more than 2,000 developers. It was truly a great crowd, from the opening keynote to the technical tracks and the Oracle Technology Network reception that evening. I kicked off the OTN event by telling the crowd “Today was technical; tonight is techno”. It’s nice when a joke translates across cultures, even if helped along by the house DJ.
My sponsor keynote for Java One was a bit of an homage to James Gosling and his continued references to Deutsch’s Eight Fallacies of distributed applications. Historically, applications have informed networks of their demands – latency ceilings, bandwidth to storage, and a cross-section of user interactions and access points. Most of the time, applications get this wrong, or make incomplete assumptions about the network itself per Deutch’s list. The value of network applications, and of having a developer platform that exposes the network to general purpose developers, is that the network can now inform applications. Whether it’s identifying the signature of an over-simplification (like assuming transit times or cost round to zero) or providing details on ingress and egress data volumes and cost models, nework applications have a symbiotic relationship with user-level applications. It was encouraging to hear Nandini Ramani from Oracle’s Fusion Middleware Group discuss Oracle’s goals of providing network-aware libraries in a future release of Java. Even more interesting to me was Nandini’s hint that Java 9 will include data integration capabillities via name/value stores, because the procedural and data-driven domains need to remain joined at the coder’s hip (and hipness).
Leaving Hyderabad for Kuala Lumpur and then Ho Chi Minh City, one of the Duty Free store staff recognized the Juniper logo on my backpack and had some nice words about my company. That’s the kind of brand recognition you want; we can operate as an ingredient brand by making networks faster, more scalable and more efficient, and we have top-level brand recognition for that engineering leadership. It was a nice close to a 16-hour day.
Wednesday May 12, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. I was immediately struck by four things at the airport: A huge number of construction cranes (the best indicator of an economy’s growth); an almost impassable sea of people with white driver pick-up signs (the second indicator of growth); intense, tropical heat and very smooth, rich iced coffee to offset the heat and crush of people. 
Someone joked with me that Ho Chi Minh City has 8 million residents with 12 million motorbikes, and the swarm of two-wheelers at every intersection didn’t make that seem like hyperbole. Both India and Vietnam benefit from the literal mobility of a new middle class, empowered by fast enough personal transportation. More amazingly, Vietnam is home to about 90 million people: roughly one-quarter the population of the US. It’s a country rich in many ways, from people to culture to a construction boom that was accepting materials at 3:00 AM (at least from the way I interpreted the noises at that hour).
We had a wonderful summit with our Juniper Networks partners from Southeast Asia, and I discussed the value of software and its integration. My attempts to imitate the fan dancers who welcomed us into the morning session was less humorous that I had hoped (I stapled a 20,000 VND note to a fan and waved it up the aisle, showing that “Software is Money”). However, nobody fell asleep (or left the room) in my post-lunch slot, which is my first metric for a good afternoon.
I left the hotel at 3:30 AM Friday morning for the first leg of my outbound flight to Hong Kong. After tracking downs and distance for the early part of the week, I realized that I didn’t really complete a small circle tour. My total flight plan described a pair of small semi-circles, going parallel to the equator en route to Hong Kong and then perpendicular to it over the Arctic on the way back to New York. Total distance: seven flight legs, three hotels, somewhere between six and eight buffets, way too many hot peppers, and about 21,000 miles in the air. Overall, an impressively smooth and well-organized trip, thanks to each of our local offices and the folks who ran Oracle Develop/Java One India.