How to sum up 2 years

This is one of the "it's been a long time since my last blogpost" type posts and I'm about to confess to my non-blogging sins (and I'll try to make it short), before I move on to talk about my new venture with Puzzlepart.

The past 4,5 years I've been employed with Objectware, a norwegian consultancy with a great .NET and Java community and a lot of cool people. At the end of my last blogging period (2003-2006) I decided to get more introvert and I've spent the last two years focusing on the internal community and my colleagues, opposed to the years before that where I was an active part of the global .NET and Sharepoint community through blogging, evangelism and the MVP program.

I've learned a lot about organizational skills, strategy and management the past two years while still beeing able to squeeze in some time for coding. Among other things I got to participate in a large financial integration project with Objectware consultant Lars Flågan which was a real challenge. Beeing part of Objectwares SOA community we applied the communities principles in practice by establishing a SOA platform exposing mainframe data in more than 15 services from a whole bunch of sources in less than 1,5 manyears. Working with service orientation in Objectware was one of the coolest technical challenges I encountered in this period, and I would recommend everyone that has an interest for progressive SOA thinking to visit the recently opened Objectware SOA Community Wiki where the ambition is to connect Enterprise Architecture via Service Orientation to actual running implementations on Java and .NET platforms. Also watch out for their GeekCruises from Oslo-Kiel where anyone can apply to join in for an intensive weekend of geek discussions, coding and fun.

Working in a cross tech community in Objectware is cool, but I've also learned a lot in implementing Scrum and Scrum-of-scrum within the .NET department. Scrum as a communication and follow-up model for software projects actually work, but it required careful consideration to toolset and routines. And of course constant refactoring of the process itself to keep it lean and effective. Hopefully I'll be able to attend Smidig 2008 (Agile 2008) in Oslo which is running for its second year with tons of cool lightning talks and open spaces sessions for people interested in improving software development processes.

I've also had the chance to get in-depth with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, both 3.0 and 4.0, and through several projects I've experienced the product from both a development, deployment, and infrastructure standpoint. In regards to Sharepoint and MOSS 2007 I've acted as dev lead and mentor in several projects, but sadly the time for extensive hands-on has been limited. However I've kept my eyes closely on the community and made sure I got the time to play with all the new bits and pieces to get up to speed.

So with that beeing said I can probably move on to talk a little bit about Puzzlepart in the coming posts.