2007 at Hippo

My last working day of the year was the Friday before Christmas so my working year at Hippo is over now. A lot has happened in my second year as developer for Hippo. I have built 3 websites on my own thanks to the Hippo Project Wizard. I worked on a few more websites with other colleagues like our own (new) website.

According to Ohloh I did 36 commits to the trunk of Hippo CMS 6 in 2007. Most of them were very trivial and I’ve set the record of least lines modified per commit but sometimes even tiny improvements can make people happy.

With Bart, Ard and others I worked on the Hippo Community Apps of which the newsletter manager is the most important component. An interface to manage newsletters from Hippo CMS was a very wanted feature. It cost a lot more time than we expected but the delivered product contained more features than we first specified. In the end we also created an interface to manage polls, another frequently used component in websites.

This blog space is not the only way I can communicate about Hippo and Cocoon. With Jeroen I spoke on the ApacheCon EU about building websites with Apache Cocoon. Later this year I gave a demo of the Hippo Project Wizard during the Cocoon GetTogether in Rome. 28 degrees, sunny, the venue was the zoo and the food was Italian. What a trip 😀

I also did some courses about Hippo and Cocoon and found out I had learned a lot in the past 2 years. The basics of Cocoon and XSLT have become such a routine for me that it’s already hard to imagine that someone doesn’t know about them. Maybe I’ll say the same about JSP next year. I had to learn it very fast to help others develop websites running on Hippo Repository and Hippo CMS and use JSP to display the front end.

I almost forgot the real fun stuff that has (nearly) nothing to do with technology: Friday evening drinks, champagne when colleaguea were elected as committer or even member (Ate) of the ASF, playing tennis on the company Wii, the boat trip near Muiden, the GPS cat-and-mouse game in the centre of Amsterdam with food and drinks afterwards. It was a great year.