Highlights of 2007

January started with an opportunity to perform technical coaching in Spanish language and I was also started to write a book about the framework Acegi Security, which is an extension of the popular Spring Framework for Java. At the City of Knowledge in Panama City I met with a bunch of Panamian Information Architects at the UXcamp and later I got to meet a huge number of technical geeks at Geek Fest Panama.

During a field trip to a small village in the mountains in Western Panama in February I got ID checked and learned about how to deal with police in Panama.

On the technical side I learned to use the Tapestry web framework and Hibernate annotations in March, which then led to an effort to evaluate technologies for new product development to lay out a Java framework stack for rapid software development.

I wrote my first blog article in Spanish and declared my love for TDD in April.

In Mai we started to eat our own dogfood and use it for ourselves at my company Caimito Development when we were working on our product codenamed Savila.

June saw me commenting about immigration laws in developing countries from the perspective of me being an immigrant to Panama.

Later in July I wrote about cultural sensitivity and the backslash of having none. During a visit to a client in California I attended a meeting in Palo Alto about Silicon Valley is looking to do business in Latin America and got an interesting comment to my blog post by an American trying to do business in Latin America. We later met face to face for more conversation.

The technology scene in Panama is quite small and in September I got involved with the organizers of the upcoming PanamaJUG conference.

By the end of November spoke about an Agile Development Organization in Miami and Tampa and also expressed how I dislike crammed team rooms.

Eventually in December the first PanamaJUG conference happened in the remote town of Chitre in the western part of Panama - a place where one would not be looking for a gathering of software developers amidst cattle farming and other agricultural activities.

Photo Galleries

To explore the country we started to live in a bit we went to Isla Grande and to the mountains of Veraguas where we visited a coffee factory.

Besides the article about it there is also a photo gallery with impressions from the first Panama JUG Conference held in the country side of Chitre.

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