wasdev_alasdair

In Jeopardy fashion: "Things the Liberty team can't do for you."

On a more serious note I can try to pass the suggestion on.

My experience is similar to wasdev_kat. I did a Computer Science degree and went straight from Uni to working for IBM UK. Getting into IBM was a little strange for me, I had a bursary for University and worked for IBM during the summers so I was a known quantity and had a streamlined recruitment process. I remember being interviewed by one manager who spent all his time telling me how great his team was and why I should move to it. I'm not sure he really knew what he was talking to me about.

Once I started IBM decided where I would work. The only thing I really did was say "I want to work in development". I had worked in the tests team for MQSeries (now WebSphere MQ) during summers and wanted to work in development. It turns out my first job was working on WAS v4 as "the samples guy" for the JMS team, I'm still referred to by some colleagues as "the samples guy".

Although I've worked on every WAS release since 2001 I've worked on loads of different things, the really nice thing has been that while working on one product I've managed to do ESB/message broker, messaging/connectivity, security, written a few container and most recently been working on the Liberty profile. I like a new challenge so every few years I find something new to do and so far that hasn't involved leaving this product.

Perhaps it goes beyond this, but working on the Liberty profile has been a truly awesome experience. The team is amazing and they are always trying to do things in new and more effective ways. We have been given the opportunity to do something really special and it really is the thing I'm most proud of in my career. Normally I look for new opportunities every 18 months, but I've been working on Liberty for almost 3 years and I'm not looking to move.

As much as I might like to I can't get into specifics about next steps, but we are seeking feedback on what the next things we should add in are. Liberty is more than just an awesome development server (which it is), but also has a place running production web sites and you should expect more along the lines of:

• Better for developers
• Better in production
• More programming models

We have added JMS in the 8.5.next beta, which is going live as I type this. Adding things like @Asynchronous is harder to talk about, we are actively looking for feedback on what we should enable beyond Web profile which is why we have JAX-WS and JMS available beyond Web profile.

As a Mac user and a member of the Liberty development team it is totally awesome! :D

The fact it helped me to justify to IBM using a mac was in no way related to us providing support.

No, we think Liberty is a pretty cool name.