2008.pngThe year 2008 has almost passed. It is the last day of the year and I want to do some reflection on this year at gridshore. Did you ever think about reflection? Do you use it in you day to day life? Do you use a component for it? Well this is not the reflection I am talking about. I just want to talk about what has happened to gridshore in this year. If you are not interested in history or reflection, you can skip this post.

Analytics

Wow, the change in statistics is immense. Of course I did do some things on the blog to make it more visible, but it is the content that does the real job. We added the blog to javablogs and some items are added to DZone. One of the articles went really crazy. December the 16th we had 646 visits. 357 visits came to the same article. 240 visits came from DZone. That was very impressive, but not normal.

Overall the amount of visits per day increased a lot as well. The following image gives you an idea about the visits compared to last year.

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WordPress

This year I started with a new blogging framework. I moved from Serendipity to WordPress and yes that was a very good choice. I liked the new interface, the plugins, the themes and the community around it. I also like the possibility to use external tools to write blog posts. During the year I think I used two different themes. Choosing the theme is very important for the support of plugins and functionality. I currently use a theme from BFA Webdesign.

Technology

So what did we blog about in this year? I started of with some items about Mac OSX and using java on it and doing OSGi with felix. Freddie wrote some articles about BPM and SOA. Allard wrote about web services. Ben immediately was very diverse in his topics, man that guy can write. I am proud to have him on board. I also started writing about flex. Soon this became the most read topic on the blog.

In the beginning of the year both Freddie and me wrote about new steps in our career. This step helped me to investigate more technologies. JTeam enables me to do more in projects, which inspires me to do more in my own time as well.

In April I created the linked in group. The group now has 23 members coming from all over the world.

In may Allard wrote a series of items about Web services and how to use them in the real world. Ben wrote a very nice article about being a software engineer at parties.

In July I started blogging about Hippo. I did my first project with Hippo and wanted to share some knowledge about combining the Spring framework and hippo.

In september me and Allard went to Denmark to visit the JAOO. There we were introduced in the circuit breaker pattern. That influenced the remainder of the year for Allard in a good way :-).

October was the period of Ben and his holiday, he wrote a few pieces on libraries and other things that made him think during his holiday. I wrote a few items on other technologies. I played around with google apps and did a project with google Guice. Allard wrote a piece on a new way of rating talks and content for conferences. We still need to pick this up.

November was the month Freddie found back his inspiration. He started writing doing proof of concepts and other software engineering topics. Ben wrote a nice piece about software consultancy in general that was commented a large number of times by others. Ben also wrote a post about Obama.

December was the month of post 100 in wordpress, not bad in one year. It was also the month of the highest number of hits this year. I guess DZone is going to bring us more hits the coming year. The year ends with some nice posts from Ben, one about jvm instrumentation. This was read a large amount of times as well. Freddie wrote a good post about lean software development and defects.

2009

So what is 2009 going to bring? Well I cannot speak for the others. I am planning a few posts on hippo ecm 7, mostly the integration with spring. Of course there will be more items about flex and I hope some items about spring framework 3.0. Not sure what else, if you have any ideas or maybe even requests, use the comments and maybe we can do something with it.

I wish you all a very knowledgeable 2009, hope to see you all back.

Greetz Jettro

Gridshore 2008 reflection