I have been meaning to blog about my recent accomplishments in the Java community for a couple of months now but other things kept coming up. Today a cheque arrived in the mail so I figure it's time to write about it. In August I was invited to join the NetBeans Dream Team. Below is a brief description from the NetBeans Dream Team wiki:

The NetBeans Dream Team is a community-driven group of highly skilled NetBeans users and contributors. They participate at NetBeans developer events, on mailing lists and developer forums, providing new, interesting and informative content as well as developing new and creative ways to promote NetBeans.

I accepted the invitation and one of my first official volunteer tasks was to be on a panel of judges evaluating plugins written by community members for the NetBeans Innovators Grant Contest. You can see my quote about one of the plugins I evaluated at the bottom of the page (Cube°n). The lucky bugger got something like $12,000 US for his work, then an additional $10,000 US for coming out at the top of the list (Gold Award). I'm really happy to be a member because there are a lot of very talented people in this group including book authors, JCP expert group members, accomplished consultants and public speakers, etc.

Soon after, the Sun GlassFish people contacted me about my contributions to their community. I am one of many winners in the GlassFish Awards Program. I won't say how much money I won, but I am very pleased with it! Thank you Sun! The picture on the right is my GlassFish Awards Program happy dance. Well, ok, that isn't really me :) My contributions were: SSL and HTTP BASIC authentication with Glassfish and JAX-WS, Creating a Windows service for GlassFish V2, re-published Windows service information in GlassFish wiki, a bunch of bug reports and enhancement requests, and general activity in the mailing list.

Last week I was contacted by DZone asking if I would like to become a Most Valued Blogger (MVB) because they have "re-printed" several of my blog entries and wanted to be able to do it as much as they want without having to ask me every time. I accepted and am now listed on their MVB page. They sent me a T-Shirt, a bunch of ref-cards, and a nice notebook (paper :). The first blog entry they re-posted since I became an MVB was The Cost of SpringSource Enterprise Support which got a lot of reads the first few days.