Paul Withers Blog

About Me

I have been a developer since 2000, primarily with the IBM/HCL Domino stack. When IBM introduced XPages, a JSF-based framework, to the stack in 2009 I was one of the early adopters, blogging, training, speaking and eventually co-authoring "XPages Extension Library" by IBM Press in 2012 and acting as technical editor for "Mastering XPages 2nd Edition" by IBM Press in 2014. As a technical evangelist I was recognised by IBM in their IBM Champion program, which started in 20111 for the IBM Collaboration Solutions brand (which included IBM Domino). I was an ever-present champion since it's inception and in 2018 was made a Lifetime IBM Champion. When HCL bought Domino and other products from IBM in 2019 I became an HCL Master and HCL Grandmaster (now re-titled HCL Lifetime Ambassador).

I've been a committed contributor to open source since 2011 and I firmly believe in learning through sharing and empowering others. I always try to understand the "why" behind the "what", and help verbalise that for others too. By sharing code I've learned a great deal from other contributors and through feature requests. From October 2013 to October 2024 I was a board member of the open source organisation OpenNTF.

After working as a Domino user and developer, for both a Domino customer and business partner, in November 2019 I joined the product owner, HCL. I work as a technical architect in the HCL Labs team, covering R&D, innovation and open source.

I have strong experience as a technical evangelist. I have always worked closely with end users to build requirements and help them think from all angles. In terms of language, I have a firm preference for Java over JavaScript. I like the strongly-typed nature of Java, which catches more "simple" errors and lets me focus on thinking about more complex issues. More recent development experience covered HCL Connections, Node-RED, Vaadin, a little Vert.x and a little Node.js development.

Wherever life takes me, this blog is about sharing, learning and growing.

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I can be found on Threads as @paul.s.withers.