Episode 39, recorded Thursday 17th February 2011, discussing the massively successful ‘Mastering XPages’ book, Domino Designer on the Mac, Watson and more…

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Tony McGuckin (linkedin) is a software engineer in the IBM Ireland software lab. He began his career with IBM in 2006 working in software product development on the Lotus Component Designer runtime before morphing into the XPages core runtime team. When not directly contributing to the core runtime, Tony is busy with software research and development for the next generation of application development tooling for both Domino server and XPiNC. He also spends time engaging directly with IBM customers as an XPages consultant, and being involved with the IBM OneUI web applications and iWidgets adoption workgroup. Tony lives in Northern Ireland where its always warm and sunny.

Martin Donnelly (linkedin) is a software architect and tech lead for the XPages runtime team in IBM Ireland and has worked on all three XPages releases from Notes/Domino 8.5 through 8.5.2, Prior to this, Martin also worked on XFaces for Lotus Component Designer and on JSF tooling for Rational Application Developer. In the 1990s while living and working in Massachusetts, he was a lead developer on Domino Designer. Now, once again based in Ireland, Martin lives in Cork with his wife, three daughters, and two greyhounds. When pressed, he confesses to playing soccer on a weekly basis, and salmon fishing during the summer when the opportunity presents itself.

Mark Wallace (linkedIn) is a software architect working in the IBM Ireland software lab. In the past, he worked on the XSP runtime, which was developed for Lotus Component Designer and subsequently evolved into the XPages runtime. He has a keen interest in programming models and improving developer productivity. Mark has worked in Lotus and IBM for more than 15 years on various products and is currently working on Sametime Unified Telephony. Mark lives in Dublin with his wife and two children and spends as much time as possible in the Ireland’s sunny south east enjoying fishing and kayaking with his family.

Topics

Mastering XPages Book

* How did the book come about?

* When did you start work?

* It’s quite a tome! 750 pages! How long did it take you to write?

* Who is the book aimed at?

* How did you split out the workload?  By chapter, by topic?

* Who was responsible for the overall flow and organisation of the content?

* The book was launched just prior to Lotusphere – great timing!

* At LS11 it out sold any book at any IBM event in the last 6 years!

* How have sales gone so far?

* Pleased with the reaction?

* Did that “fixed date”cause extra work?

* What were the greatest challenges to writing the book?

* How did you overcome them?

* Would you write another one, given the experience?

* Did you have to make any changes when 8.5.2 shipped?

* Why write a book?

* Has it raised your profile in IBM?

* Discounts, discounts, get yer discounts here

* Good through February!!!

* Get 35% off the book in the US

* Get 40% off the ebook version

* See