It’s this time of the year again. Time for the yearly summary of conferences, travels, community activities, open source projects, amazing people!
Like most recent years, I have been speaking at quite a few conferences around the World. The countries I visited as a speaker in 2018 were Sweden, Germany, USA, England, Denmark, France, Belgium, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.
![](https://www.agilejava.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/20181215_220945-1024x576.jpg)
One of the highlights this year was to be awarded the JCP Outstanding Spec Lead Award together with Christian Kaltepoth for our work with JSR 371.
![](https://www.agilejava.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Ivar_Grimstad_Award_2018-1.jpg)
Another acknowledgement by the community was to be re-elected for an associate seat in the JCP Executive Committee.
Besides speaking at conferences, a great deal of my time in 2018 was dedicated Jakarta EE at the Eclipse Foundation where I act as the PMC Lead of EE4J a well as being a member of the Steering-, Specification-, and Marketing C
All in all 2018 was an eventful year and I expect no less of 2019!
And Happy New Year2019 from Poland! Looking forward to some news about Java, Jakarta and Apache, JCP and Netbeans! Good luck Ivar, keeping fingers crossed.