I am Stephen Fenech, originally from the small island of Malta but now living in Helsinki Finland. My IT career started with Mule. I was hired with 2 others by Ross Mason, the creator of the Mule ESB in the summer of my third year of University. It was quite overwhelming coming from a predominantly .Net environment and being faced with so many new things, a so many different libraries. JMS, JDBC, CXF, AXIS, the Commons libaries, the Backport libraries, Acegi, it was madness (I never used Wikipedia so much as in my first month of "Real" work). However I really started to like Open Source and mostly Integration. I liked being able to see exactly how things work and just get your hands dirty, and I also liked getting things to work together.
Working with Mule was great! Was involved in the creation of the Mule course, delivered training and had consulting gigs with many clients. Also had the opportunity to work on some of Mule core and also created a couple of transports. All in all, Mule was a great technology which forced me to learn so many new skills. More recently, I have started to delve in the world of Camel, Servicemix and OSGI. Still not as fluent as with Mule but getting there.
Some other areas of interest are BPM, mainly Bonita, Activitii and Intalio. I also like Spring ROO, especially with version 1.2. Basically, I am interested in anything which would help me to get the job done in the most efficient and elegant way possible.
