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 2011 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.
My LinkedIn Profile has this public page.
Social
I can be found on Threads as @paul.s.withers.
Slideshare
Some of my presentations can be found on Slideshare.
GitHub
Some of my open source projects can be found on GitHub. More recent ones for HCL can be found on the HCL Software GitHub.