One year’s time

It is amazing what can be done in exactly one year’s time.  January 17th will have been the 2nd anniversary since Lincoln Baxter and I started OcpSoft.  It’s been one seriously fun, and wild, ride with JavaServer Faces and the open-source community.  I want to take a moment to talk about my partner’s success story and what he has accomplished in just one short year.

The Beginning

When we started OcpSoft, we were working on what is now ScrumShark- using JSF 1.2 , Hibernate, and many other technologies.  At first it was very overwhelming, challenging to figure out which technologies to use; though, even after we had chosen our technology stack, we fought with poor documentation, lack of support, and integration as we explored new features of the stack. During that time Lincoln saw a need for pretty URLs, because what was currently on the market wasn’t intuitive, and was painful to work with.  The enhancements we requested weren’t getting approved or were too slow coming, even providing patches.  So Lincoln set out to do it himself, and as he puts it: “destroyed Thanksgiving 2008.”

PrettyFaces

Thanks to PrettyFaces, Lincoln dug-in to JSF and started to really understand the inner workings of both problem and solution; within a few weeks of releasing version one, we were seeing many supporters.  Soon after, Lincoln was contacted by Dan Allen from JBoss/Red Hat, and started assisting him with an enhancement to JSF’s navigation system. During that same time Lincoln convinced us – at OcpSoft – to start using JSF 2 Beta to build ScrumShark.  JSF 2 was undergoing continuous changes at that time, and the specification wasn’t even public, so we were seeing different results in our application every week.  Lincoln started posting the issues on the JSF 2 mailing list, and quickly became known as the JSF 2 tester, bug-finder.  Without ScrumShark, and Lincoln willing to take a chance on a bleeding edge technology, I don’t think the JSF 2 team would have found and fixed all the bugs as fast as they did.  Not too long after this, he joined the JSF Expert Group and was presenting PrettyFaces at JSFSummit.

Congratulations Lincoln!

He just got a job with JBoss at Red Hat, as a Senior Software Engineer. I am proud of of what my partner and best friend Lincoln has accomplished.