review

Review of 2011

In many ways this year has been much the same as previous years, well on the work front anyway. 

In late January we had the annual trip to Florida for Lotusphere, Tim Clark and I presented a couple of sessions which I always enjoy. The Lotus world is lucky that Tim has stuck around now that he’s left IBM, and I am lucky that he agreed to present with me again in a couple of weeks when we head back to Florida for Lotusphere 2012. This year I will also be doing a session with Warren Elsmore, something we’ve been trying to do for a couple of years but only this year have we managed to get around to putting something together, it should be a fun session.

But this is meant to be a review of 2011, not a sales pitch for my sessions in Florida!

The other events of the year were UKLUG and IamLUG. I had to do slightly fewer LUGs this year due to work pressure elsewhere, on which more later. But the two I did go to were, as ever, well attended, informative and well organised. Despite all of the other things going on with the world economy, or maybe because of that the LUGs seem to be flourishing and long may that last.

The other travel I’ve done this year has been related to speaking, after a fashion. 2011 seems to be the year that XPages reached the tipping point, lots of new people want to start creating XPages applications so my two offerings of video training at XPages101.net and classroom based training have become increasingly popular over the year. So in the last few months I’ve flown all over Europe giving classes and meeting some interesting new people along the way.

We had a great summer holiday in Canada exploring Montreal and Newfoundland and were lucky enough to see icebergs and many whales along the Atlantic coast.

My year has been dramatically different for other reasons though. From silly things like finally going to Glastonbury for the first time right through to some of the best things which have ever happened to me. In just 5 weeks I will be getting married with many family and friends attending what we hope will be a wonderful weekend here in London. And then in April, our first child is due to be born. As you can imagine the first half of 2012 promises to be a fairly busy time so I expect to be doing a lot less travelling and a lot less sleeping!

Times are so exciting right now that I can hardly wait for the next year to begin, but I will try and reflect for a while on a great year which is just finishing. 2011 was so amazing I can but hope that 2012 matches it.

</2011><2012>

December 30, 2011 by 2

Review of the Year – 2010

It seems like lots of bloggers do these end of year wrap up posts, and I understand that lots find them boring. But as with all my blogging, I largely write posts for my own benefit. I just spent half an hour reading my previous few years posts and I find it interesting to see how things have moved on in some ways and stayed the same in many others.

Anyway, the year started, as ever, with Lotusphere. A crack team of Elguji and LDC manned the Elguji stand in the product showcase and Tim Clark and I presented our Show ‘n’ Tell session. All in all it was a very good week with lots of new contacts made. The one thing which working in the showcase means is that it’s pretty much impossible to get to see any sessions. So for 2011 we’re not doing the stand and instead I plan to cram as much new techie goodness into my head as possible.

The first half of the year got pretty much taken over with travel to various user groups and training courses. BLUG, DanNotes, XPages training became my life until the end of May. And just to make the travel even more entertaining, Warren Elsmore and I got trapped in Copenhagen trying to get home thanks to the Ash Cloud. This became an epic trip home involving cars and trains, but unfortunately no planes. It also marked, looking back on it, a huge turning point in telecommunications for me. The #GreatGeekEscape hashtag on Twitter provided entertainment for those watching us try to get home, but from our point of view people were able to help us find travel options in pretty close to real time. On the flip side, the image of Warren and I sat in a Fiat 500 (a lovely if small car) with 2 laptops and 3 phones trying to find our way through a new road system in Holland having already driven for 8 hours is one I can happily forget.

The other effect of Twitter on my online life is that I am blogging less and less. With Twitter taking the minutiae of day to day life and XPages101.net taking the majority of my technical posts I’m not sure what’s going to happen with the blog as time goes on but for the moment it will stay here, just getting updated less frequently.

Talking of XPages101, this really took a lot of my time this year and it’s been a very interesting experience. The whole driver came from our session at Lotusphere. Several people said they’d like to see it converted into online video. To make it worthwhile I had to go through the process of breaking it up, creating the supporting material and so had to charge for the whole endeavour. I had absolutely no idea if people would be interested. Well I’m happy to say that well over 150 of you have been interested. I know that it’s all gone quiet on the video front for the last couple of months, but there will be more in the New Year, consider that a resolution. The combination of the video course and the classroom course seems to work rather well. I’ve been into several companies and organised my own training days which people seem to like as a way of getting going with XPages. The plan is to continue with these introductory classes and then supplement those with a new intermediate and advanced course. I just need to decide what that actually means, where the interest lies.

The other work parts of my life – IdeaJam and IQJam with Elguji and consulting with LDC have been keeping me pretty busy (especially over the last few months hence the lack of new videos). The challenge with these three competing streams of work is striking a balance between them all. Overall it’s pretty difficult to complain about having too much work to do.

IdeaJam work has been especially interesting this year with continued growth in sales to companies and governments around the world, but we’re noticing a distinct increase in interest in our hosted offerings so I’ve been working away on infrastructure tools to help us quickly deploy and manage new IdeaJam sites which is why there’s been a slight slow down of late in new features for the public site. But worry not, we have a huge queue of enhancement requests to get through and I am making good progress on the next version of IdeaJam.

The LDC is still a great source of new work, help with existing projects and support from some of the smartest people in the Lotus world. We’re always looking for new projects and most of us will be at Lotusphere, so if you’d like to know more just collar Julian, Mark or myself and we’ll be happy to have a chat with you.

The end of the year was marked, unusually, with ILUG running in Belfast. I think you’ve probably seen the amazing coverage it got on blogs, twitter, video sites etc. It was a great success thanks, mainly, to the efforts of Paul and Eileen. It’s a testament to them that there are so many other user groups using the same model around the world now. Of course the planning for UKLUG is already starting so the focus shifts to Manchester in May.

The most important change in my life this year has been a personal one. I do tend to not get into “real” life stuff on here too much, but let me just say that I’ve had the best year of my life outside of work hours. Those of you who know me, know why and hopefully have noticed how much happier I am. Long may it continue.

I suspect that for many 2010 wasn’t a good year, if so let’s hope that 2011 is better. Always one to buck trends I’ve been very lucky and had a great year with interesting things happening on all fronts. I’m not sure how 2011 can match up but we can but hope.

</2010> <2011>

December 30, 2010 by 1

The Big Libel Gig

Last night was the Libel Reform Big Libel Gig in central London. A benefit evening to raise money for Dr Simon Singh to continue the libel court battle he is currently defending (and has been fighting for two years now). The serious element of this is that the libel laws in the UK are ludicrous. It is very very easy to get sued (and not just by people from the UK, we are currently the home of libel tourism for the rest of the world due to the inequities of our legal system), and very very difficult to win. Even if you do win, as in the case of Ben Goldacre, then you are still likely to be massively out of pocket on costs.

Robin Ince has a very nice sideline in setting up these benefit / multi performer evenings. By all accounts last night was quite similar to one of the Nine Lessons For Godless People evenings at Christmas. This is “a good thing”. When you’re able to get Marcus Brigstocke, Ed Byrne, Shappi Khorsandi, Brian Cox (yes he of Lotusphere 2010 fame), Simon Singh, Richard Wiseman, Ben Goldacre, Dara O Briain and Tim Minchin into less than four hours, you’re onto a winner!

Of the evening, I thought Marcus Brigstocke, Brian Cox and Dara O Briain were just superb. Very funny, and inspiring.

What’s more important is that the money raising continues for the legal battles that are currently going on. You can find out more at libelreform.org

March 15, 2010 by 0

Notes and Domino 8.5.1 – The Upgrader’s Guide – Review

So this is the official 387’th review of IBM Lotus Notes and Domino – The Upgrader’s Guide. Finally every Lotus blogger in the world has now received a copy of the book!

It’s an odd situation for me to find myself in, it’s great to see a book being published about Notes and Domino again. There’s not really been anything of value for the developer since Rocky and Brian’s seminal Notes and Domino 6 Programming Bible which was published seven years ago. And I wish I could say that this new book from Packt Publishing was worth buying, but from the point of view of the developer there is really very little of value in here.

What we (and by we, I mean you and I, the gentle, unappreciated Notes/Domino developer) get is 40 pages of basically extended release notes with very little detail about how to do anything with Notes and Domino programming. To take my favourite topic, XPages as an example, there is a single page that just says “and we now have XPages, yay!”. There are books of material that could be written about the subject on it’s own. It’s faintly ridiculous to just skirt over this whole new programming paradigm in a single page.

So what is the point of the book? I’ve been trying to work out who it would add value to and I am really struggling I’m afraid. I guess, at a push if you have an R6.x based environment and you just want to spend a couple of hours getting the list of new features straight in your head then you could do worse than reading this over a couple of hours. Hardly a ringing endorsement really. The problem that the writers and publisher faces with a book of this style is that it doesn’t really know what it’s trying to achieve. Now if there was an XPages Bible in the style of Brian and Rocky’s book then I would probably end up with several copies but this upgrader’s guide is just not any use to me.

March 13, 2010 by 3

Review of the Year – 2009

Every year, for the last several, I’ve done a blog post sometime between Christmas and New Year that wraps up my life over the previous 12 months. Normally there has been some big change, but this year has been more evolutionary than revolutionary.

As ever, the year started with Lotusphere, but it was a very different one for me for two reasons, I was speaking for the first time and it was a great (if pant wettingly scary) experience, one that I hope to continue for a few years to come. Indeed Tim Clark and I will be presenting in less than three weeks at Lotusphere 2010. The other big change at Lotusphere 2009 was that Elguji had a stand on the Showcase floor. It gives a totally different view on the proceedings, still great fun of course, and also something that we’ll be repeating in a few weeks time.

The public speaking continued on a couple of fronts throughout the year with sessions at The View Developer 2009, IamLUG and UKLUG. All great events in their own way. The user group scene continues to expand and get better every year. There are several European groups that I’m going to try and get to during 2010. The speaking is the biggest new thing for me this year. If you’re unsure about getting started, all I can say is that I highly recommend it. And this is coming from an introvert who was pathologically scared of public speaking until recently.

In parallel to the conferences and user groups, I was lucky enough to continue to get invited along to various XPages courses run by IBM. XPages has been the constant technology throughout the year for me. From January when we released the XPages version of IdeaJam through to later in the year and the release of IQJam. And into 2010 with my new XPages101 course that’s running in February.

Elguji has been the main constant during the year. We’ve had some great success in sales of IdeaJam to more companies, government organisations and, more publicly with the Lotus Knows IdeaJam in August. It continues to be great fun, and to keep things moving along we added lots of new features to IdeaJam and a whole new product called IQJam. Launching in November we’ve already had encouraging sales to both existing IdeaJam customers and new customers for Elguji, in both cases people seem really excited about the possibilities with the tool that we have created. Working with Bruce and Gayle has been the most rewarding thing I’ve done in my professional life, we’re building a really nice little company, but more importantly having fun as we go.

While Elguji has taken up a large portion of my time, I’ve also been working on some cool consulting projects as well. Mick Moignard and I created an XPages application which was both challenging and interesting (thank the Lord for the arrival of 8.5.1 is all I’ll say!), and the LDC grouping of independent developers continues to offer some interesting opportunities. Even when we’re all off doing our own thing then it’s good to have people like Ben, Julian, Mark and Rob around to run problems past (and maybe have the occasional beverage with as well).

There was no ILUG 2009 which made UKLUG all the bigger. We all decamped up to Edinburgh, people flew in from all over the world and, for two days, everyone seemed to have an amazing time. Lots of new friendships were made, late nights were had, large Martinis drunk. Roll on all of the user groups next year is all I can say.

The blurring of work and personal lives continue with more and more people using Twitter to keep in contact, the never ending Skype chats. To make things even more blurred, this year has also included a wonderful trip to Vancouver, WA to see Bruce, Gayle and family, walking weekends in Northern Ireland and Yorkshire. Hopefully the walking weekends will continue into next year.

Other than that, a 2010 that is as good as 2009 would be fine with me, but why not be greedy? 2010 is looking very positive, hopefully it is for you as well.

</2009>

</noughties>

<teens>

<2010>

December 28, 2009 by 3