Recently I had the opportunity to spend couple weeks in Europe. During that trip I spent some time at Liferay office in Germany. It was really nice to see my German collegues and of course enjoy some German wheat beer and Apple Wine which is typical for the region.

I also spent some time in Finland and was able to visit both family and friends. Also had some beer with my few friends from Logica. From Finland I went to Sweden to speak at the very first Liferay Nordic Symposium but before going there I spoke at Warm-up Cruise arranged by Liferay partner Ambientia. Check out Ambientias blog post and my presentation on SAML.  You can also check out my presentation on Liferay Nordic Symposium: Developing Liferay Plugins with Maven.

I can't believe it's already been already 3 years since I left Logica and joined Liferay. Today it's exactly 3 years when I moved from Finland to Germany to join Liferay as a senior consultant. It's been really interesting 3 years. First 18 months I worked from our German office in Frankfurt am Main. My duties were mostly helping our customers and partners with their Liferay architecture and performance tuning. I also did quite a few trainings all over Europe. Although travelling was quite exhausting I still enjoyed it quite a bit.

During my time in Germany I also got to participate in some core engineering tasks in form of sponsored development.  Sponsored development is where a customer comes to us with some feature or enhancements they want in the core product and as a result we find a way to implement the customer needs in such a way that we can include it in the core product for everyone else to take advantage of too. 

When I joined Liferay the intention was that I would join the team in Los Angeles as a core engineer. Well it took some time to get all the paper work done for US immigration and for me to get a H-1B visa but that finally happend about 18 months ago and that's when I relocated to sunny Southern California. Now I live in Los Angeles and work as a core engineer from our LA office. 

It's been amazing 3 years and I'm so proud to be member of our amazing team. It hasn't been without some challenges and frustration (mostly against USCIS) but I think it's all been worth it. This is truly one of the rare companies that care about more than just shareholder profits. It really cares about it's employees, customers and community and not to forget about society in general. One of our perks is that we can get paid days off to participate in volunteer programs. 

If you'd like to join us check out our career pages and feel free to contact me.

I've finally replaced my Wordpress blog with Liferay. This is something I've wanted to do for long time and now I think Liferay's blog portlet is good enough to do it. The CMS has been superior for quite sometime. The site a little bit under construction still but I've brought the most popular posts. If you want to comment you must create an account but it's really simple and fast if you have Facebook account or OpenID. 

Here's a post I made to my Liferay blog on how to cluster Liferay with Terracotta.

My review copy of Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Intranets from Packt Publishing was waiting for me at my desk in June already but haven't had time to go through it until now. Thanks again Packt for providing the opportunity to review their books.

Book details:
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Language: English
Pages: 692
Release date: May 7, 2010
ISBN: 1849510385
ISBN 13: 978-1849510387
Author: Jonas X. Yuan
Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 1.5 inches

This book is an updated version of Liferay Portal Enterprise Intranets which was written for Liferay Portal 5.2. The book has been reorganized and has doubled in the number of pages from the first one. This book is targeted to beginners and portal administrators. Notice the difference: Portal administrator is the person responsible of composing the portal pages where as system administrator is responsible of installing, configuring and tuning of the portal. The book introduces you to the terminologi used by Liferay portal as well as to many of the features Liferay has. Overall Jonas has done a good job with the book and it provides you a starting place to learn to use Liferay Portal.

Now if you are looking to become a Liferay expert the fastest route there is through Liferay trainings. Liferay has great trainings that will teach you hands on to use Liferay the way it was intended.

You might also be interested in the authors blog post about the book and my previous book reviews.