2009: The Year that was...

The year 2009 has been one of the busiest yet greatest year of my life. Now that it is over, I made a blog entry summarizing what happened to me last year.

There are too many events in this year that are worth remembering. Most notably, I had finished my undergraduate thesis just in time and graduated cum laude despite all the hardships and troubles that came my way. The best thing that happened is my employment at Orange and Bronze Software Labs, Inc.

I attended Orange and Bronze's Java Boot Camp during my first few weeks in the company. During that time, I had gained more knowledge in Java, especially the Java Best practices. It also made me realized the truth about Object-oriented programming. I had learned JSP (Java Server Pages) and Servlets, along with Agile practices, Version Control System, Trac, Design Patterns, Unit Testing and TDD (Test Driven Development). It also made me aware and interested in Groovy and Grails and Java frameworks like Struts, Spring and Hibernate.

I also joined various meetups of the (Association of Filipino Java Developers (PinoyJUG) and Google Technology Users Group Philipines where I learned various technologies and updates. I also attended a Globe+Google Developer Workshop where I have seenththe Google APIs(Application Programming Interface) , Globe APIs, Open Social APIs and other APIs. I became interested to try and use them. My interest in Google technologies extended to Google App Engine and Google Wave. I was one of those who was given a Google Wave developer sandbox account and also one of the few who received Google Wave account early.

In 2009, I also started to read and study books and other instructional materials. As of now, I am studying Groovy and Grails. I also developed a simple Java-based records management app for the student publication (where I once was a part of) of my Alma Mater, Cavite State University Naic Campus. It has already been deployed and is starting to be used. I am already doing the reports feature to be added in the app so users can view and print hard copies of the records.

Other events in 2009 are my creation of a personal blog and registration for accounts in Twitter and Plurk.

Now that 2010 is here, I am expecting it to be another fun, exciting, and educational year. There are a lot of things, technologies and frameworks I want to know more of.