I consult and write from Evanston, IL, about thirteen miles North of the center of Chicago. A maintain a personal blog at www.discursive.com, and I frequently contribute to the OnJava blog.

I've just finished writing, assembling, and editing Maven: The Definitive Guide, a free, green book which is going to be published by O'Reilly in Q3 of 2008. Before that, I had the pleasure to work with Ryan Fowler and James Elliott on the Second Edition of Harnessing Hibernate. A few years ago, Vincent Massol and I collaborated on the first Maven book: Maven: A Developer's Notebook, and prior to that I wrote the Jakarta Commons Cookbook in 2003 and 2004.

I'm committed to the idea that open source documentation is as important to the success of a project as the source code itself - documentation is a primary artifact. This is a lesson most programmers tend to forget after having it hammered into them by Computer Science professors and teaching assistants at The University. In the real world, as in the academy, your coding efforts do suffer that "automatic 30 point reduction in final grading" if fail to supply the required user documentation. Even in the most well-respected open source efforts, documentation remains a governor on adoption and progress. I want to help convince other developers to take the time to get involved in open source documentation. Who said DocBook isn't fun?