Welcome to My Blog

About Me

I have been a developer since 2000, primarily with the IBM 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 have been recognised by IBM in their IBM Champion program as an ever-present champion since it's inception for the IBM Collaboration Solutions brand (which includes IBM Domino) in 2011. I've been a committed contributor to open source during that time 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. Since October 2013 I've been a board member of the open source organisation OpenNTF.

The Future

I don't know exactly what the future holds for me. I believe 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, which is another aspect I enjoy. In terms of language, I have a firm preference for Java over JavaScript. I like the strongly-typed nature of Java, that catches more "simple" errors and lets me focus on thinking about more complex issues. For over a year I've been working with Vaadin. I enjoy the vibrancy of its community, the quality of the documentation, the passion of its evangelists, and the willingness of the company to recommend best practice. In terms of backend, I've helped with development of a Tinkerpop-based graph API and the intersection point of graph and NoSQL appeals to me a lot. A preference for which graph implementation has been harder to define.

Either way, this blog is about sharing, learning and growing.