Looking back at 2007 and forward to 2008

It has been a while since I've written anything here. I've been working on a rather big Rails application, I gave two talks (well, actually the same talk twice) about web application security in Bavaria and Frankfurt and I attended the Sun Tech Days in Frankfurt. How did I like them? They were OK. James Gosling's keynote was not too informative, nothing new no real outlook... Craig McClanahan's keynote titled "Developing in a Polyglot World" was very good. He said that nowadays it's not enough to know one programming language and get by. No. You need to know multiple languages and you need to know when to use which. Take so-called Web 2.0 applications: You need to know HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Ruby, Rails (or any other language for the backend) and most likely SQL (even with Rails you SHOULD know and understand SQL). A truly great keynote. Another truly great presentation was "More Concurrency: The Ten Unofficial Laws" by Heinz Kabutz and Kirk Pepperdine. You can learn A LOT about Java concurrency here and read up about everything in detail on the Java Specialists website. Definitely worth checking out. So, yes, I guess it was worth spending one night on a train and another night in a very crappy hotel, barely :). So what can I say about being a freelancer now that I can look back on 6 months? I love it. I can work from home, I learned a lot, I work with very interesting technologies, and I can develop in a way I think is right and efficient. So what about 2008? I want to do much more with Rails, I have a prospective iPhone application in the pipeline and I'd love to do more Mac/Cocoa development again, using some of the cool new features Leopard offers to developers. Oh, and attending WWDC 2008 is definitely on my to-do-list and so is RailsConf. I just don't know where and when RailsConf Europe 2008 will be taking place. That doesn't matter, though, because I'll be there :). If RailsConf Europe 2008 will be anything like these two keynotes promise, it will be time very very well spent: Dave Thomas Keynote, DHH Keynote.