JavaOne 2012/Joining Oracle

I had two sessions at JavaOne this year. One was a solo talk on the CDI ecosystem. It was well-attended and I got excellent feedback on it. The other was a joint talk with my fellow co-author Ryan Cuprak on Java EE tooling support. The talk went very well as well considering we had stiff competition from other very good Java EE talks.

JavaOne this year was different for me in a very significant way -- I did not present as an indepenent this year but as an Oracle employee! In fact, the first day of JavaOne was my first day as an Oracle employee. I was invited to join Oracle as Java EE/GlassFish evangelist alongside the likes of Arun Gupta (Arun introduced me to the community at the Sunday GlassFish community event).

The decision to join was by no means an easy one as I've always seen myself as an engineer and a consultant. And the truth is that some of the connotations of the evangelist title has always made me cringe a little even with shining examples like Apple's Steve Jobs/Guy Kawasaki, Googles' Vint Cerf and Microsoft's Vinod Kumar who bear little resemblance to either religious zealots or mercenary salesmen. I also cannot honestly say I have no reservations about Oracle as a company.

I took on the opportunity because I believe I can really make a difference for the community in this role and help advance Java as an insider in the truest sense. As Oracle seems to understand, as the new stewards of Java, Oracle needs more people from the community like me working inside their walls. As a very nice side effect, this also helps me reclaim some of my personal time by essentially turning what I had been doing for some years on my own time into my actual job...

In the spirit of merging ones hobby/adopted cause/personal time with one's profession, I likely won't be maintaining this blog going forward much. Instead, I'll be reaching out to the community via my official Oracle blog here as well as the the Aquarium blog.

All views voiced are my own, not necessarily Oracle's.