OFF TOPIC: 30 Years Later

I received an invitation to attend a 30-year reunion of my St. Peter Celestine 8th grade graduating class. Wow! I did the math and yep...it's been 30 years.

Of course I had to rummage through the old pictures and stuff to see what remembrances I could dig up from this byegone era. I kinda felt like Indiana Jones in search of ancient treasure. After a little digging, I found the picture below of me and three of my 8th grade amigos:


My friends are from left to right:

• Bart Heenan: currently lives in Virginia Beach and is CEO of Morphix Technologies. 20 years ago, Bart and his wife Karen set me up on a successful blind date with Irene Iocono; Irene and I have been married for 18 years.


• Steve DeLuca: currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area and is a Portfolio Manager at Spinner Asset Management. I ran into Steve a couple of years ago at an Investors conference in San Francisco.
  
• Bill Nicoletti: currently lives in Wilmington Delaware and is President of Visual Innovations. About 10 years ago, Bill and I played on an "over 30" baseball team together.

Yep...that's me on the right...pretty scary!

Lest I wallow in remembrances too long, I've come to the sobering realization that I was actually younger than my daughter Liza is now (she's a Junior at Cherry Hill West...my alma mater) and I was one year older than my son Billy is now (he's in 7th grade).

30 years goes by so quickly!

Technology News at JBoss World

While the news for Day 1 of JBoss World focused on the Enterprise Acceleration initiative, Day 2 unveiled the product and technology news.

For customers chomping at the bit for our ESB-based solution, the team announced the arrival of the new SOA Platform.

For folks interested in new community technologies, they were greeted with news around three new OSS projects:

The RHQ project is a joint effort between Red Hat and Hyperic focused on providing common services for infrastructure management. This project will provide the basis for the upcoming JBoss Operations Network 2.0. We've had a long standing partnership with Hyperic and this project represents the fruits of our joint engineering labor over the years.

The DNA project is a new JBoss.org project, spearheaded by the MetaMatrix team, focused on providing an open source repository and tools that make it easy to capture, version, analyze, and understand the fundamental building blocks of information, models, service and process definitions, schemas, source code, and other artifacts. This is just the first project designed to address the complex and varied needs of SOA governance.

The BlackTie project, while not yet launched, is arguably my favorite of the three new project announcements. Why? Because I have been competing with BEA for many years and hopefully the name of this new project is an indicator of what it's about...namely freeing Tuxedo customers from the yoke of their massive maintenance fees.

Anyhow, that's the tech news for today at JBoss World...we hope you enjoy it.

ROBLOX Redux

In my Future of Open Source blog, I posed the question: "Are online destinations like ROBLOX grooming the next generation of open source developers?".

What leads me to ask this question is how platforms like ROBLOX are encouraging our next-generation of developers to interact with its cloud-based platform and create and extend virtual worlds using collaborative approaches that are arguably at the heart of professional open source development.

John Shedletsky (aka Telamon), a ROBLOX developer, picked up on my post and wrote a great article drawing the corallary between the ROBLOX model and the open source model.

1. He begins by illustrating the fact that there are Multiple Levels of Engagement (Basic User, Intermediate User, Advanced User, and Power User); his simple pyramid diagram is quite effective
   
2. He describes the power of Massive Peer to Peer Collaboration
3. He discusses how ROBLOX uses Economic Incentives to encourage production of high-quality content.
4. He closes with how an Exposure to Engineering at an early age influences the future
   

So, I'd like to thank John for his post. I could not have described things better. I do believe that sites like ROBLOX are absolutely shaping our next-generation of developers. And since it promotes what is arguably an open source collaborative methodology, I maintain my assertion that they are shaping our next-generation of professional open source developers.