Kevin Farnham's Blog tag:dev2dev.bea.com,2008:/blog/kfarnham//307 2008-04-17T04:10:24Z Movable Type 3.31 Hello! (from the New Dev2Dev and Arch2Arch Editor-in-Chief) http://dev2dev.bea.com/blog/kfarnham/archive/2008/04/hello_from_the_new_dev2dev_and.html 2008-04-16T05:24:44Z 2008-04-17T04:10:24Z Hi! I'm Kevin Farnham, the new editor-in-chief for Dev2Dev and Arch2Arch. I'm taking over from Jon Mountjoy, who has decided to move on to a new endeavor. I learned a lot from Jon during the past couple years, as... kfarnham Hi! I'm Kevin Farnham, the new editor-in-chief for Dev2Dev and Arch2Arch. I'm taking over from Jon Mountjoy, who has decided to move on to a new endeavor.

I learned a lot from Jon during the past couple years, as I worked with him at O'Reilly Media. I think we'll all miss his insight. He spent quite a lot of time introducing me to the editorial duties for Dev2Dev and Arch2Arch, so I'm hoping to be able to step right in and keep things running smoothly.

My background is software engineering, almost 30 years of it. As you'd expect, in a career that long, I've seen and worked with quite a lot of different technologies on multiple platforms. Most of my experience is on Unix/Linux platforms, and I also have a lot of experience on Windows platforms. As for technologies, over the years I've done a lot of work in Fortran, Basic, C, C++, Java, Perl, and .NET.

For the past 10 years or so, I've been involved in editing and writing, alongside my software development work. If you have any Java books published in the 1999-2002 period (for example, Wrox's "Professional Java Server Programming J2EE Edition"), you might find me listed as a technical reviewer in the credits.

I also worked with and became quite familiar with WebLogic during that period. The small dot-com company I worked for at the time had plans for an enterprise online document and billing platform that was going to be developed using J2EE technology. I was tasked to investigate the top J2EE platforms and make a recommendation. After several months of study, I recommended WebLogic and BEA's related technologies.

Based on my recommendations, the VP of Software Development and I worked on a partnership with BEA. Unfortunately, our project never fully got off the ground before the dot-com bust hit. But working on the study gave me an fairly in-depth introduction to the BEA's product suite, which in my view was the best available for our needs.

A few weeks ago I attended a Dev2Dev Tech Day in Boston, and got a bit caught up on what's happened since those days several years ago. I'm happy to say it all came back pretty quickly.

I'm looking forward to being a member of the Dev2Dev and Arch2Arch communities. You'll see my first Editor's posts soon.

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