Obligatory First Post from Andrew Spyker

Terry invited me to join the community. I plan to get busy posting as much as I can, but I thought I'd start with an intro post. Someone beat me with a stick if I don't post within a week with real content.

I have been with IBM WebSphere Application Server for the past five years as a lead of our performance team. My time in performance has given me time to focus on many things - J2EE, Java, Security, Web Services, and more recently all things relating to our SOA foundation. Earlier this year I was promoted to STSM (Senior Technical Staff Member) and asked to broaden this focus more formally as a SOA Runtime Architect. This means I get to focus on more than performance (which I have traditionally done since performance allows you to experience all aspects of the product end-to-end) and more than WAS (ie. the rest of the SOA foundation). My focus as of late is how we can drive our XML strategy forward in both function and performance given XML is one of the core building blocks of all of our SOA runtimes. Also, I still advise the team I've built in WAS performance on daily basis. More on all of that later.

So in the end you should see a mix of content on XML, SOA, and performance from me.