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This Week in JBoss: 25 December 2020

I’m writing this on Christmas Day and have spent the last week or so thinking about what I should put into my traditional 25th of December entry. Then it came to me in that "lightbulb moment": I’d replicate, more or less, what I said to my entire team/org before I went on vacation a few days earlier. It’s a summary of the year and I think it’s relevant for our wider community too. So here it is in a slightly modified form …​

I wanted to spend a few minutes thanking you all for the work and interactions you’ve done over this testing year! I don’t think anyone could have predicted 2020 at the start of the year and I think it’s fair to say that every one of us has been affected in one way or another. Yet if you look back on the year and the accomplishments we’ve achieved as a community, you could be forgiven for thinking this was a normal year!

  • Making Quarkus available to all OpenShift customers, which we announced at KubeCon, as well as continuing the innovation within (e.g., Hibernate Reactive, RESTeasy Reactive);

  • Knative/Serverless, where we now have 7 Working Group leads out of 15 in the Knative community, we also added Functions to OpenShift Serverless;

  • More and more of our technologies become available to Kube developers;

  • We continued our close involvement with AdoptOpenJDK (aka Eclipse Adoptium), helping to push it to even greater heights;

  • So many great innovations continued around efforts such as Kogito, Strimzi, Camel-K, Eclipse Vert.x, Infinispan, …​

  • We all managed to host, attend, present at countless virtual conferences, workshops and Red Hat Summit; probably enough to realise what we’re all missing from the real things!

  • Eclipse MicroProfile 4.0 and Eclipse Jakarta EE 9.0 both come to life;

The list could go on and on (e.g., EAP XD, OptaPlanner, …) but my point isn’t so much to call out the successes that this community have helped to drive but rather to illustrate that we were able to do these and more at all! In the climate of 2020, retaining the kind of focus we have and continuing to go above and beyond, as many of you and the teams have, is a testament to Red Hat and our communities, our culture and the supporting bonds you’ve all built up and nurtured. For that alone I thank you and you should all be incredibly proud!

With that in mind, whether or not you celebrate Christmas or intend to take extended time away, make sure you do take time to rest and recharge. Be with your friends and family as much as you can given the continuing Covid situation. Find time to unwind but also congratulate yourself on coming together in 2020 and delivering so much to our communities, partners and customers. I’m not even going to try to predict what 2021 will be like but if we can replicate what we’ve been able to do in 2020, I’m sure we’ll all come through it stronger and together!

Mark Little