a year of firsts
Category musings
For the past few years, I've posted some form of "annual review" on, or in the vicinity of, the last day of the calendar year. This year when the proverbial ball dropped I was simply far too busy to engage in such reflection.
For the past few years, I've posted some form of "annual review" on, or in the vicinity of, the last day of the calendar year. This year when the proverbial ball dropped I was simply far too busy to engage in such reflection.
Over the past week, while at Lotusphere 2010, I lost count of how many times some remark from a colleague prompted from me some variation upon, "this really has been an amazing year," prompting from them, in turn, a reminder that the year to which I was most likely referring was already over and a new year had begun. And finally it struck me: in many ways, my year now starts and ends at Lotusphere, just as believers of many faiths choose to treat a worship service as the close of one week and the beginning of another. Hence, I thought it fitting to spend some time over the course of the conference to reflect upon the experiences that I considered significant since the last time I'd wandered those halls, sat in sessions, and, yes, "serenaded" my fellow Yellowbleeders at Kimono's.
It took little time for a pattern to emerge: while the past year has, once again, been marked by personal growth and loss, professional development and challenges, this has been - more so than any other year I can recall - a year of many "firsts" for me. Here are just a few that came to mind:
- I lost a parent. Before you ask, my mother and father are both, thankfully, still very much alive. My father-in-law, however, passed away in early November. I haven't spoken of this publicly before now for numerous reasons, but the experience of losing him had a profound impact on how I view my gratitude for the relationship I have with my own parents, my goals for the kind of person I hope to someday become, and how precious is each moment we have with the people who shape our lives, so I thought it fitting in this context to mention that experience - one that none of us can ever truly prepare for but must all eventually face.
- I co-authored an article for THE VIEW with Nathan. (aside: I always feel a little silly capitalizing the entire name, since Internet etiquette considers that to be shouting... on the other hand, later in this list you'll see why, over time, I'm likely to become more accustomed to capitalizing a brand name in my blog posts.) Possibly because the article was about XPages, but more likely because of my co-author's reputation, the article received so much attention that we were asked to submit a follow-up article, which was published just a few weeks after the first.
- At MWLUG in August, I had the chance to give a presentation about XPages. Not only was this the first time I'd presented a Domino-related session at a Lotus User Group, this was my first experience with public speaking since doing end user Lotus Notes training for new employees (typically 5 - 10 at a time in a small conference room) many years ago. My pacing was not what I'd hoped, so I blew through the last half of the content at approximately Mach 3 and still went over the allotted time by about 10 minutes... but it was a great experience nonetheless, and several people expressed to me afterwards that they found the session to be very informative.
- I was given the honor of co-presenting (with Stephan Wissel) a session at Lotusphere. After all I'd heard about how much work goes into preparing these sessions, and judging by my experience at MWLUG, I had braced myself for a daunting task. With Stephan's help, however, the preparation was far easier than I'd anticipated, and - even better - the session itself was actually fun. I can't deny it was still a bit overwhelming presenting to several hundred attendees, but their response - both throughout the session and in the days since - made it clear that we accomplished the goals we'd established for the session despite being unable, in the short time we had, to demonstrate a couple of nuances we'd hoped to include.
- I experienced an acquisition that actually proved mutually beneficial. As many of you are now aware, as of October 1, Lotus 911 officially became GROUP Experts, a division of GROUP Business Software. Unlike similar transitions I've experienced at previous employers, this acquisition truly was a merger: with practically no overlap in specialty but an identical vision and passion, our own branding has changed but our day-to-day operations have not. GROUP as a whole gained a services division, and we gained an incredible sales team with proven experience in successfully bringing products to market. In the past, we've written some pretty cool applications that weren't directly commissioned by a client, but until now, those have typically been proofs of concept to demonstrate our capabilities as a consulting services provider or to familiarize ourselves with (and, in many cases, push the boundaries of) some aspect of the Lotus Notes/Domino platform. But now that we're part of GROUP, those of you who would welcome such an occurrence will be excited to know that you will likely soon be able to actually purchase something that came out of our development lab. Which reminds me...
- A patent application was recently filed listing me as an inventor. I'm sure you'll be seeing many mentions on Nathan's blog and elsewhere about our Innova framework, but here's the elevator pitch: it allows you to create entire XPage applications directly from the Notes client... no Designer, no Eclipse, no IDE of any kind. You simply create documents that define the structure of the database (such as the records that comprise it and the relationship between those records) and the application interface, and Innova handles the rest. </elevator> Other frameworks in Domino have used a similar conceptual approach, so why is this patent-worthy? Because - in addition to some crazy-cool interface rendering techniques - Innova uses a mutable 3NF data structure, providing not only atypical storage and performance efficiencies, but also allowing on-the-glass interaction with data relationships in a more intuitive fashion than is usually seen in "hard-coded" Domino applications... not to mention in a context where the application itself (be it CRM, help desk, ERP...) is defined entirely as data records with no modification to the underlying software at all. To our knowledge, not only has 3NF never been used this way in any XPage framework, this has never before been done in Domino, period. Again, I'm sure Nathan will tell you much more about this in the weeks to come, but I couldn't help bragging at least a little bit about how cool Innova is.
- GROUP won the CTO Lotus Award for EMEA this year. This is the first time a project I was directly involved with resulted in a Lotus Award. However, something I wrote on my own (albeit with some CSS assistance from our graphic designer after the initial release) was also named as a finalist for a Lotus Award in another category.
- On Tuesday, I had an opportunity to give a one-on-one demo of Innova for Alistair Rennie at his request. While this is not the first conversation I've had with a General Manager of Lotus, it certainly was the first time a GM walked straight across the Product Showcase floor to our booth specifically to ask me to show him something I'd helped to both architect and implement. Because Alistair is such a cool guy to begin with, after my short demonstration of what Innova currently looks like and description of our plans for what it will continue to become, he stuck around for a while and we just chatted about XPages and the state of Lotus in general. Then, after he wished me a good show and started to walk away, a "booth babe" from another vendor, who had been standing behind him throughout our conversation, asked him to come to their booth to watch a demo of one of their offerings... and he did. Alistair is (as jonvon would put it) unassailably cool. In fact, the best way I can think of to encapsulate how wonderful my week was is to stipulate that my conversation with Alistair was not the single biggest highlight of the conference... ANY other year (thus far), it absolutely would have been.
So... uh... sorry that turned into such a sales pitch. I really didn't mean for it to be. But after years of trying to keep this blog purely technical and not a blatant marketing channel for my employer, I can't honestly reflect on everything that's happened over the past year without expressing how excited I am about what we are now jointly capable of and the role I have the good fortune to play in that. It's thrilling and overwhelming and I can't wait to see what new opportunities this year will bring (if the latest code drop of 8.5.2 that was just delivered to design partners and managed beta participants is any indication, it's gonna be cuh-ray-zee... and y'all know I don't use that word lightly).
As I return to the "normal" life that connects one Lotusphere to another, and envision the possibilities for what this year might contain, I want to thank the people in my life that make it so fulfilling, exciting, and hopeful, especially my wife, my family, and the literally hundreds of folks who pleasantly blur the distinction between colleague and friend. I'm incredibly fortunate to have you in my life. May 2010 bring you countless blessings and opportunities to bless others... you've certainly blessed me.
), but this one's even bigger, 
even though it's not animated. And they used an exclamation point in the link text... yeah, I'm sure they mean it this time.
