Steve Vinoski's Blog

My first Internet Computing column of 2009 is now available. It’s entitled “New Year’s Integration Resolutions” and it offers advice pertaining to areas of integration and distributed systems where over the years I’ve seen various companies and individuals, including myself at times, repeat the same common mistakes. I give the advice in the form of some suggested new year’s resolutions, hence the title.

Something to note about this column is that it completes 7 years of “Toward Integration.” That’s a long time, trust me. :-) Two years ago I stopped working on middleware and integration as a full-time role, so it doesn’t really feel right anymore for me to still be doling out advice on those topics, and I’ve definitely used up all the residual topics I had left. What this means is that this is the final “Toward Integration” column you’ll ever see.

Whether that’s good news or bad news depends, of course, on whether you liked or disliked “Toward Integration.” :-) I generally received positive feedback over the years on all the columns, but I know there are some out there who disagreed with some of them. That’s perfectly normal, of course. Regardless of which camp you fall in, if you ever sent me considered feedback on any of the columns, I really appreciate it.

But then again, I should be clear that it’s not truly the end; I’ll be starting a new column on a new topic in the magazine’s next issue. I don’t yet have a new title for the column, and in fact it may not be as focused as “Toward Integration” generally was. But I’ll need to come up with a new title soon, since I have only about two weeks left before I have to submit the first issue of the new column to my editor.