A short year-end reflection

I don’t know whether the end of 2007 calls for looking back or making predictions. I’ll do a bit of both and give this little reflection some balance.

Let me start a little further back. I’ve been here with you for five years through this blog, with varying degrees of success. When I started in 2002, there were a few blogs, then called weblogs (perhaps because they were about the web), such as Sova v síti and conBlog. Nobody wrote about Java, and I didn’t have especially lofty ambitions either. Today I count seven regularly updated Czech blogs about Java in my RSS reader. More are appearing and we hear about them now and then, mostly through Java.cz.

Two years ago, a gathering of the Czech Java community was little more than a wish. In 2007 we met ten times through CZJUG. We already have a program for the next two months of 2008 (REST, GlassFish clustering, performance), and several possible topics for later meetings (security, OSGi). We’re just as busy preparing more episodes of our irregular podcast.

On a personal note, when I started five years ago, this blog had exactly one reader, me. Then visitors began to trickle in, and their numbers keep growing, which makes me very happy. Over time I found out that quite a few colleagues read it, which led to a few uncomfortable moments after I’d let my mouth run away with me. I now know it isn’t wise to take potshots at colleagues in Southeast Asia and expect to get away with it. Czech has made it there too.

To be honest, I don’t really know what’s coming in the Java world next year. I won’t lose sleep over it. There’ll be so much happening that picking something to write about won’t be a problem. That shows Java is a mature, functioning ecosystem with a future. It faces challenges, of course. To my mind, the biggest is making development more efficient. We’ll see which challenges are met, and how well.

What sort of year-end reflection would this be without a wish for the new year? Dear readers, I wish you good health above all in 2008. We can buy everything else ;-)…