30 certainly was something - No Fluff Just Stuff

30 certainly was something

Posted by: Dan Allen on April 2, 2009

What a year! There's no question that year 30 was the most eventful and life changing year of my life to this point. I truly feel like I have grabbed life by the horns and got it steered in the direction I really want it to head.

By far, the biggest accomplishment of the year was getting Seam in Action published. But writing my first book was the catalyst for many of the other events that took place. From start to finish of year 30, I presented for the first time at a software conference, which led to a half a dozen speaking engagements, more travel than I've ever done in one year, including my first ever trip to Europe, and the chance to meet a lot of prominent industry leaders. Writing the book also helped me be more prolific. I passed my 100th blog entry and posted 1000 tweets on Twitter, which I began using just before JavaOne. The gutsiest and most permanent decision I made all year was deciding to get LASIK, and in the words of Tiger Woods, "the results were fantastic". What follows is an account of this passage into my 30 somethings, most of which can be found in my tweet archive.

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Dan Allen

About Dan Allen

Dan is an open source advocate, community catalyst, software generalist, author and speaker. Most of the time, he's hacking using some JVM language. He leads the Asciidoctor project and serves as the community liaison for Arquillian. He builds on these experiences to help make a variety of open source projects wildly successful, including Asciidoctor, Arquillian, Opal and JBoss Forge.

Dan is the author of Seam in Action (Manning, 2008) and has written articles for NFJS, the Magazine, IBM developerWorks, Java Tech Journal and JAXenter. He's also an internationally recognized speaker, having presented at major software conferences including JavaOne, Devoxx, NFJS, UberConf, RWX, JAX and jFokus. He's recognized as a JavaOne Rock Star and Java (JVM) Champion.

After a long conference day, you'll likely find Dan geeking out about technology, documentation and testing with fellow community members over a Trappist beer or Kentucky Bourbon.

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