2008 in review

This was a really good year for me, busy with lots of new things as this was my first year back on the commercial side of software development. In the personal sphere I moved into a new house, put in a new backyard, new front yard, and cycled quite a bit with stints in the Limburg hills, Veluwe hills, and Ardennes. I just finished this year up by upgrading my bike and putting my old on online for sale.

The most blogging traumatic experience of 2008 was the loss of my domain. I documented the experience, but would not recommend this to anyone. It took awhile but my blog slowly climbed back from obscurity.

This year I was involved with several projects:

• The PRIMA project which involved some students at my work.
• Got involved with jBPM, Straight Through Processing, and the JBPM portion of my blog was added to the community blogs on JBOSS.
• Plugging away on AbTLinux and opened a new blog on it.

I also visited conferences, did some writing, did a few teaching gigs, and was speaking publicly again:

• taught guest lecture at Radboud University Nijmegen, on requirements engineering.
• taught Linux on zSeries at European Patent Offices and for IBM.
• visited the Dutch Java Users Group JSpring conference
• visited the same groups JFall conference and gave a talk on jBPM.
• visited the Linux World Expo in Utrecht Jaarbeurs and gave a talk on open source.
• submitted a paper to a conference (rejected), then reworked story into a chapter (accepted).
• at the end of the year I became a member of the open source expert panel at Computable (Dutch IT magazine), with my input in two articles.

I have already started to fill up my calendar for 2009 with a few submissions to speak at conferences, one writing gig, and hope to continue with both jBPM and Computable contributions.

Being healthy and happy, I wish you and yours all the best for 2009!