HCL Ambassador 2024 & looking back and looking forward

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Just before Christmas, I received a nice mail from HCL telling me that in 2024, I will still be an HCL Ambassador. A big thanks to all the people who nominated me.

Welcome to the HCL Ambassadors Class of 2024

Looking Back

2023 was a weird year for me. I spent the majority of my working hours on a product that was new to me: HCL DX. Although I had never really looked at HCL DX before, the technique behind it, was familiar. HCL DX, formerly known as WebSphere Portal, uses WebSphere as its base, a DB2 database as its database, just like HCL Connections. At the customer where I spent most of my time, HCL DX is still running as a WebSphere environment, but they’re moving towards a HCL DX environment on OpenShift and my main focus is on this new environment. My knowledge of Kubernetes, which I got from installing the HCL Connections Component pack, comes in handy. That said, I still have a lot to learn. Especially, as in the 2nd half in 2023 I moved to the team that responsible for the OpenShift environment for the HCL DX deployments. Creating pipelines, writing Helm charts and config maps is not something that I had done before and that I now have to do.

I guess, the fact that this is all a bit new to me and I don’t feel like an expert at all (yet), is an important reason why I hardly wrote any blog articles on HCL DX. I wrote one article on removing the login header and started one on installing HCL DX with the Docker compose script at the beginning of 2023, but never finished it. Overall, I wrote 13 articles in 2023. One more than in 2022, but considerably less than in the years before. Most of the articles I wrote were on HCL Domino. In particular about creating DNS Providers for CertMgr, a subject that I also presented on during Engage in the past year. Most of my Domino work in 2023 was actually in Domino development. An area that I didn’t write a single article on.

Looking Forward

Despite the fact that I will spend even more of my working hours on HCL DX this year, HCL Domino will probably also be the main topic for this blog in 2024. The reason for that is that I will be giving a presentation on Domino mail for OpenNTF in June. The agenda for Engage in April isn’t available yet, but I plan to submit two presentations this year. Said administration session on Domino mail (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, PRT records etc) and a session about all that’s new in the Domino container project. A lot has happened there since my sessions on this topic in 2022 and Domino containers are more production ready than ever. As usual, my sessions will be accompanied by some in-depth blog articles, so I suspect I will blog a bit more again this year.