My state of affairs - part 1

Now it has been a while that I have blogged, and I understand that not many people are there who follow my blog. Though some of the topics on which I have blogged in the past have been getting some good hits, I cannot maintain a regular list of people who will visit my blog often, probably because I am not regular at blogging. But thanks to those 3 feed-readers who have been with me, and probably would like to know, what keeps me busy that prevents me to write blogs, and now why is it that I am giving out an explanation. Also, probably in every other serious post that I write, I almost mention that the next post will be coming very soon, and still that does not happen.

Last 3 years

While it is a fact that I have been dealing with so many topics in the past, especially in the last 3 years or so, and every time I feel like posting about it on the blog, and yet that does not happen. all this time, I have been dealing with a vast breadth of topics in the Java space - Rules Engine/Drools, OSGi (Pax, Felix, Equinox, Karaf), Maven, ESB (ServiceMix), Message Routers (Camel), JPA/Hibernate, Spring, Webworks/Struts2, Spring Webflow, JSF, Facelets, RichFaces, REST, SOA, GAE (Google App Engine), GWT, Spring Security and its various tools, implementations and their integrations on how these topics can play with each other. It was during this time that I got more into the OSS space as well. Initially moved by the JBoss professional open sourcing and then more impressed and involved with the OPS4J philosophy. The single factor that made me meet OPS4J was its PAX line of products that dealt with OSGi. And as I started learning OSGi, I was happy to take out some of my personal time to make few commits into the same products in PAX - that made me smile better as I struggled with my initial steps with OSGi.

The journey begins

This journey begins as I complete almost one year with my previous employer, when the client and the employer impressed with my performance handed over the implementation of intelligence in an insurance quoting system to me. Thanks to them, it was a great experience. I implemented the system using Drools and I was able to deliver the system that could be taken out to production systems within 7 months from the date I was assigned the task, with hardly any help from anybody else. Whats more, the system was almost zero on bugs as of my knowledge. Here I started my journey of exploring technologies beyond the regular Java/J2EE developer. Though in the past I had done it on my personal itch, this was a better experience, since could see it working on a real system. Before this, I had experience with the regular Java/J2EE experience like the majority developers with just Servlets, JSP, Struts, SQL, EJB etc etc.

Last 2 years

Now it is almost 2 years that I've been working with my current employer, and most of this time I was into R&D primarily with OSGi and its related aspects. While I personally like to dig past bleeding edge technologies, and playing with it, a similar work profile as my job profile was something that was very exciting. I was always excited about how technology could be used constructively to provide least effort and long term solutions to real-life business problems. I was the prime responsible for bringing up a framework for the company that could be used by its products/services to cater its clients in the coming future. The power and dynamism of OSGi was a major push to this. During this time, I had the opportunity to deal with a variety of technologies to make up the framework as mentioned above. I did made serious advances in setting up the technological stack for my company based on OSGi. But I still feel very sorry that I could do very less on contributing this knowledge to the OSS, as I see people trying to struggle with OSGi and web .

But why should all that prevent from posting blogs?

All this made me so much involved in understanding the technologies that I considered it worthwhile to spend that 2-5 hours to understanding the other technology for integration to the stack, than to write a blog on what I had just learned. I even spent my personal time for understanding aspects of technology that was outside the scope in my official research. Also, its not that I did not write blogs. While a very few appeared here on my public blog, most of them went on to my corporate blog that is not a public one. Also, all this time, my understanding about any technology is something, that I think would be better to blog about as I learn more. But over the time, that never happened as I piled up more and more technologies.

So, now whats there for the future?

Guessed, it right! I am again going to say that I will try to be more regular at blogging. Blogging is a tool to showcase yourself, express your ideas and to market yourself. Now this time, there are reasons too why I should blog, about which I will be explaining in my immediately next blog (mmmh..., you will not have to wait, its ready as I write this. This blog was bloating too much, so I just decided to split it into two).