Time has come again to look back and introspect on happenings of this year to learn and equip myself better for the next year. This year had been very interesting both on the personal and work fronts. On the personal side, we had a baby boy on Oct 11 and am starting to get used to the nappy changing duty ;). It is so much fun playing with my son and watching him grow. Babies are the cutest things in this world.
On the work side, we did a successful BPEL deployment. It was indeed a good learning experience, especially, with 3DNS/Big IP acting up in production preventing the partner links from being invoked (more on this topic later). Enabling service Orientedness for the application was another fun filled exercise - coaching the team on BPMN, service identification, training the team on BPEL, whipping up schemas and more importantly getting the buy in from stakeholders and peers. Did a bit of hacking to remote deploy all the bpel suitcases to the BPEL console using commons-http-connection. We are still on BPEL PM 10.1.3.4 and have a plan to migrate to SOA Suite 11g sometime mid next year. I have also created an installer for my application based on ant installer, this is a cool stuff that helps in deploying the applications (silently) to the target envs and the dev team can stay away while the ops team does the installation :).
I read Robin Sharma's two very good books - Leader who had no title and the monk who sold his Ferrari, both are very good books and I highly recommend reading them. I have also read few technical books - BPMN method and style by Bruce Silver, Oracle SOA Suite Developer's Guide, Getting Started with SOA Suite 11g, Enterprise Architecture A - Z.
