Ron Lynn is a Senior Software Engineer on the IBM® Web Enablement and support team. He works from a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley of central California. Ron is currently working on internal portal projects that focus on giving more visibility to IBM's partner applications. He has written and spoken on portlet development and other topics numerous times and is co-author of Programming Portlets.
Ron joined IBM in June of 1995 as an indentured graduate student and has yet to return to academia. As an IBM neophyte, he spent his time working on a, now defunct, project called Knowledge Utility (KnU). KnU allowed for exploration of many technologies and theories, from a then little known language named Java™ to knowledge representation to what we now call portals and portlets. This led him to develop portlets for IBM Business Partners and proselytizing portals to the world. After landing on the Web enablement and support development team, Ron formalized his expertise into building portal applications in support of IBM's biggest customer, IBM. The team's fast pace and ever changing project line up is a fertile environment for forging applications out of the latest IBM products and technologies.
Ron's primary passion for his job is the multiplicity of skills it draws upon.
From the mathematical, theoretical, scientifical, and engineerical to the personal,
magical, and artistical. The constant variety and juggling keeps him forever learning and
wondering what will smite him next. Though there are dark times when he muses if he'd
have the same passion for his work if he were a juggler in the circus.
Ron calls a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley of central California home where he
lives with his fabulous wife, darling children, a good dog, an ornery dog, and a cat of
undetermined disposition. When he's not bent over his computers, he spends his time as a
father, husband, welder, carpenter, painter, plumber, gardener, pool boy, fine furniture
builder, farmer, mechanic, writer, and mad scientist--the last of which the kids take
exceeding delight in. Ron takes great joy in hearing his 3 year-old
say "polymer", "non-Newtonian fluid", or "onager".
He loves to see the angelic delight on little faces as the ooblick concoction crumbles when they squeeze it, or drips off when they stop. He doesn't even mind the eventual chastisement when his lovely wife discovers the mess.
Below, Ron was asked to provide a recommended reading list for anyone who might be interested.
He found this a rather difficult task because he is a voracious reader of many different genres.
He was able to put down a small sampling of suggested reading and made an attempt to keep
the list short and mostly software-centric, but it is certainly not a complete list of
what he would recommend should he be pushed to do so.
This guide to IBM's WebSphere® Portal, a state-of-the-art portal that is quickly becoming the
industry's leading portal product, provides developers with the tools necessary to become
a productive portlet programmer, from writing new portlets to rendering a portlet with a JSP.
Reviewing the latest developments in the new open portlet standard, JSR 168, this book
demonstrates how the open standard works and how programmers can write portlets that
will run on any portal platform that supports this standard. Material on communication
between portlets, form handling, the MVC portlet, and writing browser-specific code are
also presented.
It's the book to have if you're just getting
started with enterprise programming on top of WebSphere products. The burning question is will
there be an update for WebSphere Application Server V6?
This book and the next three are easy to read in that they contain many small, digestible bits. You can read them as a daily devotional, spending just a few minutes each day taking in the goodness.
We may fancy ourselves as Software Engineers, but often a better label is Software Artist.
This book is a nice collection of the hard won wisdom and philosophy of UNIX.
Much of which can be immediately used in our own works of expressionistic software.
Wonderful treatment of things we all know, but somehow "forget" all the time. I'd suggest this book to development managers and software engineers alike.
So many times I find little things in Java code that could be improved. This book provides 57 items in the spirit of Scott Meyers' Effect C++ books. Maybe Joshua will give us a "More Effective Java" book one day.
As the cover says "66 excursions into computer science". 66 ideas to file away for a rainy day in softwareland when you can amaze and beguile your colleagues with the breadth of your knowledge.
If your copy of Design Patterns by Eric Gamma, et al, is so well worn
that you mumble,
"Iterator, page 257" when you eat French fries, but you still have problems getting
dates, then this book is for you. Ok, it's for those of you who want a good giggle
too and if you haven't read Design Patterns by Gamma, et al, do so quickly before
anyone else finds out.
Sometimes the best help you can give yourself is by launching a potato across a field.
Other authors to read and enjoy:
With so many choices and recommendations, I can only suggest that you keep an
eye out for some of these authors. In no particular order.
Jack Kerouac , Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Charles Bukowski, Franz Kafka, Edward Abbey,
John Steinbeck, Douglas Adams, Clfford Pickover, Tad William, Anne Rice, H. P. Lovecraft,
Robert Anton Wilson, Neal Stephenson, Willam Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Dan Brown,
Orson Scott Card, Jostein Gaarder, Robert Heinlein, Tom Wolfe, William S. Burroughs,
Edgar Allen Poe, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lemony Snickett,
J.K. Rowling, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Robbins, Dan Millman, Ambrose Bierce,
C.S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll, Diana Gabaldon, Matthew Gregory Lewis,
Gabriel García Márquez, Terry Pratchett.
