Prosaically Entitled Inaugural Post

Welcome to the professional blog of Tim Berglund, founder of the August Technology Group. I’m no stranger to blogging, but this represents the first time I’ve committed to writing about software development exclusively. Since inaugural posts filled with a bunch of ambitious plans for my extensive future content, or high-minded declarations about how I’m going to “explore the medium,” or ever at any point putting in print the words, “Let the conversation begin!” are all just a wee bit 2004, let me just assume you know why I’m blogging and tell you a little bit about myself.

I’ve been developing software professionally since 1992, two years before I graduated from college. The first seven years of my career were dedicated to embedded firmware and simple Windows applications, usually the handmaidens of some firmware project or other. In about 2000, I discovered Java and web development and have not substantially looked back since—although I don’t mind admitting that debugging software with an oscilloscope and a soldering iron has a otherness to it that we are hard-pressed to duplicate in web development.

In the eight years since, I have developed internal web applications, ecommerce web applications, B2B integration software, specialized vertical search tools, and other great code living mostly in the world of open-source Java. Recently “Java” has included Groovy as often as not. This is a good development for the community and for me.

I started the August Technology Group in the summer of 2007 so I’d have a platform to serve customers more directly through execution, training, and mentoring in the kinds of software development I’ve done using the agile methods I’ve learned to apply. I’m starting this blog now so I can talk about software as the kind of thing I think it is: a fun, challenging, rewarding, deeply human enterprise surrounded by a richer intellectual tradition and more interesting intersection with the liberal arts than we often think.

Which isn’t to say I absolutely won’t post neat tips and tricks about how to do odd things with regular expressions in Groovy or how to configure Jetty to do thus-and-so. It’s just that I might wax philosophical on occasion as well. For those who know me, this is no surprise. For those who don’t know me, I look forward to making the introduction and getting to know you as well. Thanks for reading, and thanks for subscribing.