Intro

It's a new year! 2016 is here and it's off to a great start. I had some excellent time off with family, as I hope everyone else did, and I'm looking forward to what 2016 will bring, after such a successful 2015. In my day job, we've restructured how we go through our application development lifecycle and it is paying off with every feature release and major release. Needless to say, as busy as I'm keeping, things are much improved and things are better than ever; always a plus.

Session at IBM Connect

IBM Connect here I come 🎉! I'll be giving a session on how to expand your application devlopment workflow, using some of what I've found best practices and just plain good ideas. There should be something for every developer (and possibly developer-adjacent roles), all wrapped up in a whirlwind of slides and demos. It'll be fun. So, please join me for:

AD-1380 A Beard, An App, A Blender: One Developer's Take on Expanding How We Can Build~~ing~~ Apps with Domino/XPages on Monday, 01-Feb, 04:45 PM-05:45 PM at the Hilton Orlando, in room Florida 6-7.

Series

My series on task runners with Domino/XPages isn't done, but it will be shifting gears. I'm going to be diving down a couple of rabbit holes to flesh out some details on a couple of topics. Some of the details will make it into my session at IBM Connect, so I should have more in the series following the first week of February. It's also going to look at the broader picture of task runners in a build pipeline, so it may get a bit more nebulous and have more theory again, but I promise it should be worth it. All in all, the over arching theme in my life lately is automate everything, and it's been paying off well.

Looking Back

In 2015, I posted to this blog 35 times, spoken at IBM ConnectED and MWLUG, and created three Notes in 9 videos covering topics from general application structure, to HttpServlets to front-end development topics and things in-between (like front-end asset caching and HTTPS termination via a reverse proxy). I've gone wide afield in my quest, but that's by design. This quest I've been on is an attempt to establish some of my preferred practices in developing Domino/XPages applications, it's for the good of app. dev., for me, for selling concepts to my management, for pushing myself to be a better developer, and for sharing what I've learned that others might not need to go through some of the same foot work.

What's To Come

I have great expectations for 2016, both from myself and others. OSGi plugins have become more approachable after an excellent series by Jesse Gallagher and a series by Toby Samples, along with the efforts of others. XPages on Bluemix is shaping up to be quite the viable runtime, though some things are yet to be fully known; regardless, the feedback from the XPages development team has been excellent and has incorporated requested features, in addition to the adoption of Pull Requests and other additions in both the Extension Library and ExtLibX.

Lastly, on a more personal note, my efforts on expanding build automation at my day job have been dangerously close to outright successful. The last of my proofs of concepts have lined up and I have started to work through the next steps for a more permanent environment beyond just my work PC. I've not only been successful with headless DDE builds (triggered by Jenkins CI no less), but what's exciting is that with the duplicated git repository of our largest application working with Swiper, released recently by Cameron Gregor, I've started seeing consistently smooth results without any design element conflict artifacting which I had seen previously. Cameron's a smart guy whose projects are aimed at automating developer tasks, something that resonates with me quite well. If you ever get the chance to thank him in person, it's worth it, as he's been quite helpful in answering some questions on issues I've run into and is certainly on the list of people worthy of buying a beverage for. 🍻

Stay tuned for these and other exciting topics!

ibm connect

2015: A Year In Review