It's kind of an interesting story. I was working at a startup and we had lost our funding and we were using WebLogic Server. We were actually using the demo license of WebLogic Server and they took away the demo license. They didn't renew it. At the same time we lost our funding. So we needed to go to some solution that was free. And so we looked around the Web and stuff and we found JBoss, an open source, J2EE implementation. So we used that.

So basically, I was using it to build our application and I got sucked in more and more into fixing bugs that our application found. I started doing CMP entity locking-that sort of thing. And finally one day I get an email from Marc Fleury, the founder of JBoss, a one sentence email: "What do you do in your life?"

And I gave him my blah blah blah, here's my story, this is what I did in my past and stuff. Then I get another email from him, again one sentence: "Do you want to take the Red Pill?"

Now what that meant was: Do you want to become more involved with the JBoss Project, and of course, I was like, "Yeah, this would be great." I get to do things that I really haven't done ever, that I wanted to do at Iona, middleware I wanted to implement at Iona but didn't get a chance to. So one of the first things he asked me to do was implement the clustering implementation of JBoss 3, and that's one of the first big things I did for JBoss. And from then on I got sucked in more and more, until finally they asked me to join the JBoss Group last summer.