If you are in the area, or near enough to get here, it should be a great event and we are expecting a high turnout.  We already have a confirmed sponsor and we are working locking in a couple more.  Check out the new site, and register there to keep up to date with the event. 

See in you Charlotte in January!

Anyone in Charlotte should get down and meet up the Charlotte JUG for the December Drinks.   Also I have been messed around far too much with themes – though hopefully that will settle down soon.  And also we will have a big update on the BarCamp Charlotte.

So what does 2008 hold for me,  well no less travel it seems :)  though I am becoming a more seasoned traveller (even if Brett still picked on me complaining when I can’t a business class ticket every time!).  Also it’s an opportunity to work with a wider range of projects and technologies (I have been picking up my RoR skills a little more again),  also working with a number of different customers in a services delivery model leveraging a lot of the open source technologies but also the development models.   I did get a day in LA meeting with a number of people in the outsourcing space and it was very interesting to learn more about the strategies that can be leveraged and also the models that are commonly being used by medium or large Enterprises.  Also, we are working with a number of smaller start-ups building whole product offerings – commonly based on many of the Web2.0/Social Networking technologies, which are the talk of the town.  I’m sure this will change the conference schedule for the year,  but I’m hoping I’ll still make it out to a couple of OSS events.

I was recently talking about open source and how some of the forces are changing in the space,  2007 was a year of change for that market and while the collaboration aspects continue to grow and technologies for development collaboration continue to mature – is it also a time to start looking at 2008 and some of the trends that we will see emerging.  Having come from the Enterprise Software market I think that we’ll see some of the SOA hype start to fade and the disconnects between a Web 2.0 approach and the SOA architecture will probably become more pronounced (hopefully the vendor dependencies which have pushed people into a SOA frenzy will start to change).  With all my time in Asia over the past year it is interesting to see that Open Source is now starting to grow there – some would say in a similar way to the US a few years ago,  though I think that it will be a different adoption structure there – with many of the experiences and lessons already starting to be examined more closely. 

As I settle in for Christmas in South – on a sunny Christmas Eve – I am going to start working on blog entries for the year so that it isn’t such a quiet year :)

Not sure what I’ll be looking at for content here, I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.