Another year has passed and while looking back at 2007 I have to say it was an exciting year. So many great things happened last year, so I can only hope this year will bring the same.

I’ve seen great things happen at Hippo in 2007. The company grew, we had new partners implementing our products, did some very exciting projects and we took the next step in what I think is going to be the next big thing in content management.

While writing this post, I realize that it has been an exciting year and it all started in March, where I was voted an official Apache Cocoon comitter and joined the Apache Software Foundation. I just came back from my vacation to Spain when I realized I had been proposed as a Cocoon comitter. This was of course great news and I was overwhelmed.

May was the month that Jasha and I did a presentation about Cocoon at the ApacheCon Europe 2007 in Amsterdam. It was great to do something back after so many years for a community that has always helped us out. It was our first big presentation at a conference like ApacheCon, which made it extra exciting.

In July I got the key to my new apartment. I had been waiting for this for a while, since they were still building the place. Even though I now moved out of Amsterdam, I really enjoy living there.

The past year I traveled a lot and October was my traveling month, where I visited Rome and New York in less then 2 weeks. 2007 was the year that the Cocoon GetTogether was held in Rome, which I enjoyed a lot. I’ve been in the Cocoon community for so long now that I know most people and we had a lot of fun. The settings were great (in a zoo) and I even got to see something of the ancient city at night. Since it was my first time in Rome, I really want to visit the city again. A week later I visited New York on business for a couple of days (how cool is that!) and it is really an amazing city. We stayed in new York for about 3 days where we had a couple of meetings with some great and interesting people. I hope that I will be able to go back some day, because I really enjoyed it.

In December I took a look inside one of the other Apache communities, namely Apache Wicket. I was amazed by the amount of people that showed up for such a new Apache project. Since we at Hippo are looking very serious at Wicket, I hope to be doing a project with it soon, to see what Wicket is really all about. Seeing demos is nice, but it does not add anything, except some knowledge of what it is and how it works. Real life experience always works best for me.

I hope this year will be another successful year. I’ve been thinking about what I wanted to do next and what I do know is that I want to be more active in the Apache communities. I also want to focus on taking my SCJP exam this year, because I have the book, but was just not able to make sufficient time to study. We’ll see!