2008 flashback

That’s it. Holidays are here, this year is almost over, time slows down for a few days so that we can look back, then enjoy and start again.

This post is probably not be of great use to anyone but me, but it’s a blog after all, sometimes I can use it as a personal journal too, like all those teenagers.

This year was actually very rich to me. I got to discover a few very interesting technologies, starting with OSGi and its ability to break up with big monolithic enterprise applications. And I really dived into Flex and how it can integrate with Java, which culminated in this tutorial, which was even republished on the Adobe Developer Connection. And finally, in my quest to discover better ways to develop applications, I came across Jetbrains MPS. And when I realized it was still far from being ready for prime time, I decided to keep it on my radar but focus on a more realistic alternative on a shorter term: Groovy/Grails. Now I’ve widened my technological scope beyond just JEE and AndroMDA, and I feel quite ready for the challenges ahead.

More importantly, this year will have been a great initiatic journey. Last year at about the same period, I decided I wanted to turn one of my ideas into a company, to create my own startup. The road was bumpy, my colleagues at Axen could feel it, friends who joined me on this journey could feel it too. I put a lot of things in question: my job, my ambitions, my strengths and weaknesses. And the project failed… so far! But they say there’s always hope at the end of the tunnel.

I had the idea, I had the skills, I had the will, time and energy, and yet there was this big barrier to entry, this thing that seems so important to everybody that nations and societies, people and governments are falling apart just because of it: money. I’ve always felt bad about money, like it was the poisonous blood flowing in the veins of an otherwise healthy man, eating him from the inside out, like something that is here to transport what makes us live, but that we’ve come to confuse for life itself. And it happened, crisis happened, the disease hit us all. We’re still far from the bottom since we still believe that the best cure against poisonous blood is more blood. But I don’t want to wait. My failed project and the recent course of events have made me realize something: THERE’S GOTTA BE A BETTER WAY!

2009 is full of promises. I have already started to understand many things about myself, about why I failed on this project, about how I live, how I can improve. I moved to a new place too, more comfortable, more like me. And now I have this new project, this game changer, this new way of thinking about how creative people can turn ideas into something real. 2009 is going to be fan… wait for it… tastic!