Welcome to my new blog! I haven't blogged since August 2004, but have been inspired by our new team blog to try to lift my game. I've also been shamed by the blog-energy of my colleagues.

I'm very excited about a lot of topics at the moment, and promise to blog much more often than once every 2 years in future... Stay tuned for my thoughts about Spring 2.0 and beyond, OO design, AOP, and the future of enterprise Java.

In the meantime, I'll share my travel schedule for the next few months (which will at least give me an excuse for not always posting regularly):

• October 1-6: JAOO conference in Aarhus, Denmark.
• October 10-11: BEAWorld event in Prague. Always a beautiful city, although Prague is no longer a cheap destination.
• October 23: Keynote about Spring 2.0 at the Oracle Develop event, a new part of Oracle Open World conference, in San Francisco. This looks set to be a big conference.
• November: I'm spending most of November in Australia, partly to visit family and friends, and partly because Interface21 has opened a new office there, headed by Ben Alex, Acegi Security lead. I'll be speaking at various events, including Spring User Groups in Sydney and Brisbane, the Sydney JUG, and a forum in Melbourne.
• November 27-28: JAX Asia conference in Singapore. This is a new conference. The German JAX conferences are big and have interesting content, so I'm looking forward to it. With amazing timing, this is just at the time I was returning to London from Sydney, so I'm literally in the area... There's also a JAX conference in Jakarta, but I'm at the limit of my travel tolerance for the next few months already and just couldn't commit to that.
• December 7-10: This is going to be the most fun. The Spring Experience, in Hollywood, Florida. This year we expect over 500 developers, and great speakers as usual. Keith is doing a great job of organizing it, along with Jay Zimmerman of No Fluff Just Stuff fame.
• 11-15 December: JavaPolis in Antwerp. A big European conference, great value for attendees and always has a top speaker lineup--probably because organizer Stephan Janssen seems to know everyone who's anyone in the Java community. And of course Belgium is always worth visiting, if only for the beer. I'm a big fan of Belgian white beer in particular.

Ouch. Even writing that list made me feel tired. Fortunately I have been flying a lot less than usual for the last couple of months, so I've avoided the delays and restrictions here in UK airports. But it's pretty obvious that by late December I am going to be in serious need of a rest...