After I came on board with IONA I was sent to Dublin to work on a major refactoring effort of the old Orbix 3 (BOA based) product line. While I was there I remember thinking that perhaps I'm missing out on all the cool new stuff, including Orbix 2000 that Steve was spearheading and that IONA was just bringing to market. I felt that I needed to be at the bleeding edge and perhaps the refactoring project, as fun and challenging as it was, was not whatI should be working on. However that project was a really important project for IONA and for me as it turned out. I began to understand how important it was when Steve continued to point out how it was the most successful engineering project at IONA. I had never thought of it to that extent. Steve had a different perspective that I learned to appreciate and it was and is a wonderful endorsement from such a brilliant and successful engineer such as Steve. Steve is not only a good leader from an engineering perspective but he's always great at giving credit, encouraging others, and willing to learn from others.

I remember talking to Steve about a year ago about a small home project I was working on. My neighbor Ron does a lot of really cool embedded solutions. From design of the boards to the building of the OS to the applications and user interface design. He set me up with a small demo board for a FreeScale MC9S08GB60 microcontroller. All I managed to get time to do was to get the LEDs to count up in binary. But I loved the project of playing with hardware again, especially the process of writing the code, downloading to the board, setting the right hardware switches, and testing. I look forward to getting back to it some time. I talked about the fun I had doing it with Steve and he said he missed working with the hardware too. And now he's off to a hardware/software start up! Hmmmmm ..... it's not my fault I swear!

Yes Steve will be missed at IONA, but, as Steve says in his blog, there are great people at IONA and I'm sure he'll appreciate that the room he's made will allow someone else to lead as he did, both in engineering and in the external community on standards bodies and industry working groups.

I don't expect I'll see the port of Artix's C++stack to OS X anytime soon but I'm sure I'll read about some really cool work that Steve is producing at his opportunity of a lifetime.

Best wishes Steve and thanks for all the encouragement and fun. I'm sure we'll keep in touch.

Now where is that FreeScale microcontroller again?