Went along to see my UK colleague Andy Piper‘s presentation on "Using Social Software to Improve Your Effectiveness at Work". Andy’s an engaging speaker and his presentation was well thought out and put together. As a result I signed up for a twitter account but we’ll have to wait and see whether it gets much use let alone improving my effectiveness at work. It did also prompt me to revisit an internal file sharing tool which, having previously not realised that access could be restricted, I had discarded as much of the material I want to share is of a confidential nature.
As it’s of particular relevance to a project I’m working on at the moment, I then attended Bill Hine’s pitch on "WAS/DataPower Web Services Security Integration". A good mix of the why and how without getting bogged down in the detailed steps. Must get myself access to a DataPower box again to try some of this out.
After lunch went to a presentation by my Hursley colleague Andrew Ferrier and Andre Tost on WebSphere ESB Best Practices. Andre covered the higher level architectural best practices and Andrew the more detailed material. Nothing new for me here but it was good to see it all gathered together in one place. Hopefully they’ll make it more widely available in the not too distant future.
Unfortunately an impromptu meeting overran and I lost my slot in the Project Zero Assemble lab. It did mean that I could go along and here about the work that Pete Lambros has been doing with others on patterns for the Enterprise Service Bus.
I then took my final test of the week to qualify as IBM Certified Solution Developer — WebSphere Integration Developer V6.0.1. Once again, my generic SCA and WebSphere ESB knowledge was sufficient to compensate for my lack of knowledge about the Process Server components.
With an early start ahead of me tomorrow to catch a flight back to the UK I was grateful to Phil Coxhead for driving me out of town for a bit of last minute shopping and away from temptation (or to it depending on your point of view!). The Premium Outlet Mall didn’t yield much in the way of purchases but I came away from Frys with some new headphones, a USB hub and a Creative Zen Stone Plus (the version with speaker).