This year was my eighth year at Red Hat and my fifth year as a Technology Evangelist. While the year started with my focus being on JBoss BRMS & BPM technologies, I transitioned upwards when was approached to take on an expanded role within the Infrastructure Business Group (IBG).
This new role is as a Global Technology Evangelist and allows me to focus on full portfolio solutions, such as Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure and Red Hat Cloud Suite. It also provided a platform to initiate the Red Hat Technical Marketing Manager Practice, a company wide initiative to help all Technology Evangelists to work towards common standards.
I started the year continuing our family adventure of living on the North Carolina coast in a small town called Emerald Isle. This adventure was scheduled for just a year and at then end of our summer there, as all good things must end, we packed up and moved back to the Netherlands.
As I transitioned from application development to a more broad view of the private Cloud portfolio at Red Hat, I have been adjusting the flow of my publishing to reflect the broader view everyone in an organization needs to take. It is not just about the Cloud, the stack, operations and application development as individual islands, but it is a cooperation that needs to be understood. There is no way you can ignore the stack anymore as part of your organizations digital transformation team.
With that in mind, here is my review of my publishing and travels over the last year.
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Writing
Aside from the +100 articles published here, 68 articles were syndicated or featured on other sites that found the content of note. I also continued to work closely with DZone as an MVB as I transitioned from application development to Cloud and private PaaS solutions that support the application development lifecycle.
The transition to solutions also brought with it many new videos and tutorials that can be found online and a brand new Cloud application development demo repository called Red Hat Demo Central where you can now setup your own OpenShift Container Platform private PaaS in just minutes.
The transition to solutions also brought with it many new videos and tutorials that can be found online and a brand new Cloud application development demo repository called Red Hat Demo Central where you can now setup your own OpenShift Container Platform private PaaS in just minutes.
When I departed from my role of supporting BRMS & BPM products as an evangelist, I started a project in Feb 2016 with Manning Publishing to share my knowledge in the form of a book. Effective Business Process Management with JBoss BPM was born, I started writing and in June the Manning Early Access Program launched.
This year finished out with the book project being my biggest focus, currently with six chapters finished and online. I am writing the seventh chapter and expect to finish this book project early in 2017.
My hobby of writing as a sports journalist for RedSoxLife.com continued, but at a much slower pace due to my book project. I only pushed out one article a month on average, but that will again pick up once I finish up the book.
Travel
The places I went and the people I met again this year are what make the efforts we put into Red Hat technology evangelism worth the time and jet-lag. I wish I would be able to list everyone and every place but that is just not possible. I enjoyed the chats, the beers, the hanging out, the presentations, the workshops, the dinners, lunches and meetings with each and every one of you.I traveled more this year than any other to date, with 55 flights and 4 serious road trips. This was mostly due to my proximity of being in the US for most of 2016. The road trips included 8 days through the South, a Las Vegas and Grand Canyon drive, East Coast up to DC and a West Coast Highway 101 from San Francisco to Portland.
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| The sun sets on 2016... |
- Raleigh, NC (5x)
- Tampa, FL (2x)
- Boston, MA (9x)
- Atlanta, GA (2x)
- Las Vegas, NV
- San Francisco, CA
- Washington, DC
- Austin, TX
- San Paulo, Brazil
- Amsterdam, Netherlands (3x)
- Brussels, Belgium
- London, UK
- Edinburgh, Scotland
- Helsinki, Finland
- Breda, Netherlands
- Barcelona, Spain
Thanks to you all
I certainly hope you enjoyed what I was able to bring to you in 2016.I want to thank you personally for attending any of the webinars, conference sessions, workshops, JUG's, and JBug's were our paths might have crossed or for just taking the time to read a published article.
2017 is going to start with a bang, so join me on this wonderful ride as we explore the amazing things you can achieve with the Red Hat product portfolio... stay tuned!