As one of the three winners I’d like to thank the entire MySQL team and congratulate my co-winners, Roland Bouman and Beat Vontobel.
I’d also like to thank other honourable Community members that I had the pleasure to have contact with, like Andrew Gilfrin, Giuseppe Maxia and Jay Pipes. These people and the MySQL company have all done great work and I’m sure that a lot of great things are yet to come :-). You never make life boring.
This prize is a big honour – it’s not such a long time that I have been active in the Community, maybe half a year or so. I still consider myself to be at the beginning and I never thought it could happen so quickly that I would be recognized and awarded from the MySQL team and other Community members. I don’t have decades of development experience like some others (actually, I started programming about 2 1/2 years ago) and I’m still discovering different techniques and ways how to become a REALLY skilled developer. I believed (and still believe), I was at the beginning of a very long way – so it’s absolutely a phantastic and motivating thing to be rewarded so extremely soon in a worldwide contest from the ‘World’s Most Popular Open Source Database’ company.
So this shows, don’t be afraid if you are new to MySQL and new in the MySQL Community. It doesn’t only take people with many years of experience, there’s also a lot that “fresh” people can do to help!
Well, what are my current plans and activities? My next big step will hopefully be to pass the MySQL Professional Exam, which I plan to take around the middle of December (it requires tough work, it’s definetly no easy thing, but there was a lot to learn which I probably wouldn’t have learnt without taking the Core and soon the Professional exam). At the moment I, together with Roland Bouman, am writing an article and a code sample (that includes all the common methods that exist) about data access to MySQL using C#.NET for Andrew’s mysqldevelopment.com site.
I also have some ideas for db4free.net, so if time allows me, there could be a completely new version with new possibilities next year. It’s hard to promise it, because you never know, what’s coming up – but I’ll try hard to make it real :-). At least, the great feedback I received is very motivating and inspiring!
Well, and finally there’s my current series in my weblog about Transaction Isolation Levels, which will soon continue with the article about the REPEATABLE READ. So stay tuned!