This post was originally published here

Close to  the end of the year 2014. It has again been quite a year from me, travelling to different places of our world. Some familiar and some new places. 2014 brought me to the following cities, area’s and countries:

  • United-Kingdom London.

  • Ireland Dublin.

  • Italy Tuscany, Emilia Romagna and Lombardia (Pisa, Lucca, Viareggio, Florence, Piacenza, Poggi Bonsi, San Gimignano, Volterra, Sienna, Valconasso di Pontenure, Podenzano, and Val Trebia).

  • United-States Washington State (Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, Deception Pass, Whidbey Island, Fidalgo Island, Camano Island, and Bainbridge Island).

  • Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur.

  • Australia Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland (Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney).

  • Spain Basque Country, Spanish Pyrenees (Girona, L’estartit, Vielha).

  • Norway Olso, Bergen.

  • Sweden Stockholm.
  • Belgium, Mechelen.

For one it has been a very busy year like last year 2013. To summarize all my activity bullet wise:

  • I have had multiple speaking engagements in the Netherlands and abroad (UK, Norway, Sweden, Belgium and Australia).

  • Attended the annual MVP Summit (November).

  • Attended the BizTalk Summit (INTEGRATE2014) in Redmond (December).

  • Technical reviewer for a number of books and white papers.

  • Watched dutch soccer perform well during the WorldCup 2014.

  • Written multiple TechNet wiki articles on BizTalk and ran two half Marathons, The Hague and Berlin, in March.

  • Written dozen blog posts on this blog (especially liked the ones on service virtualization I created with the help of Andrew Slikver/Nevatech) and on the TechNet Wiki Blog.

For me personally I am happy to finally been to Australia and had a great time speaking at three cities. I really like to thank Saravana Kumar, Dean Robertson, BizTalk360 and Mexia to make this possible. Both companies made a huge commitment and made a tremendous investment in the community. Besides BizTalk360 and Mexia there are some other companies that have shown a lot of affection to our integration (BizTalk) community like: Codit, Quicklearn and Bouvet.

After the event I had a great time with my friends Mikael Hakansson and Mick Badran. Both showing me the Aussie way of live. Thanks guys!

I am also happy to see that both Richard Seroter and Stephen W. Thomas, two of my other friends, welcomed a healthy, lovely daughter in their family lives: Charlotte and Haydon.

To conclude I have had an amazing year spending working on several integration projects, travelling, seeing the Seahawks become SuperBowl champs, seeing my kids grow up, spending time with the family, friends and of course the BizTalk community. Thanks everyone for reading my blog and I will continue to share my knowledge through speaking and writing in 2015.

Cheers,

Steef-Jan