Pages

Sunday, December 2, 2018

Tracing the road,... on becoming a Java Champion


Few days ago I've been sitting in front of my laptop, I think was was coding some stuff, like a normal day :), and I accidentally opened my emails. The first email title I saw was : "Welcome to the Java Champions Program". 
I thought, what a nice Joke, because in the past I really wanted to become a Java Champion. But after reading this email more carefully, I found out that the email was real, no joke. After sorting this thing in my head I just run to my wife and son to share with them this amazing news. After all she is the one who tolerates my OpenJDK activities... due to her tolerance  I could achieve such goal. 

What is a Java Champion ? The answer can be found on the website [here] :
"The Java Champions are an exclusive group of passionate Java technology and community leaders who are community-nominated and selected under a project sponsored by Oracle. Java Champions get the opportunity to provide feedback, ideas, and direction that will help Oracle grow the Java Platform. This interchange may be in the form of technical discussions and/or community-building activities with Oracle's Java Development and Developer Program teams.

Members come from a broad cross-section of the Java community:

  • Java luminaries, senior developers, architects, and consultants
  • Academics
  • Authors of Java-related content (online & print) and industry conference speakers
  • Java User Group (JUG) leaders and the managers of Java-related portals"
After I left SUN Microsystem/Oracle I just continued to be involved very actively in Java community. When I thing about it closely, it is already almost 2 decades of my professional life spending on JVM technologies. I still work on JVM technologies on application design and architecture, currently at Volkswagen Group on some connect car related projects, more specifically at M.A.N. Truck & Bus.  

Outside of my duties, I'm quite proactive over many years. I'm doing reviews to technical books for the Pack Publishing, more specific for the following fields: Machine Learning, AI, JVM Technologies and Big Data. I've been also speaking over years at various conferences like JavaOne, CodeOne, Devoxx and others... It is always my pleasure to share the knowledge with the community to help moving things forward. I'm also blogging about various technologies and experiences [here].  
This year I've received the JavaOne/Code One Rock Star Award 2017. 
Two years ago I've started an OpenSource project. Working alone on the project was not so funny and I was happy that Marcus Hirt decided to join the team, and we work together. 

We called the project Robo4J. Robo4J [here] is the light weight framework for rapidly developing Robotics/IoT systems. We've received the Duke's Choice award 2017 for the work we have done on IoT Java field. 

Previously I've mentioned there was a time when I really wanted to become a JC, but ... Instead of being sad that I'm not a JC, I just continued to work on something else more intensively. I started to work with Marcus more closely and contributing to Java Mission Control / Flight Recorder project. The project has become a part part of OpenJDK [here] and I've become to be an Author
I'm really happy to see that the results of my contributions make a lot of people happy, more over I'm learning a lot from all OpenJDK contributors. This is the bright side, the dark side is that it costs a lot hours coding ;) And here I'm so thankful to my wife and son for understanding. 

I'm incredibly pleased to be accepted into the Java Champion program, I'm looking forward to represent ideals as good as I can. I'll give my best!



No comments: