I’ve been a code journalist for, well, more years than I care to admit. And in all that time, I’m amazed to see that the humble yet venerable, well-worn  “Hello, World” continues to grace programmers, architects, and even Agilists with its simple, unvarnished message. A brand spanking new app that says, “I can’t do much yet, but I passed the unit test and here I am.”

And so it goes with me. I’ve just taken the reins here at Developer Force as the new Editor in Chief, and I’m extremely pleased to be orchestrating content for one of the largest cloud-developer communities on the planet. For those who don’t know me, my “hello, world” is a little longer than the example app. My last gig was serving as the Chief Editor at InfoQ, a news site for enterprise software developers where I managed 40 editors and personally covered everything from dependency injection and lambdas in Java to Cloud Architectures with a little continuous delivery thrown in there somewhere. In fact, you’ll continue to see my backlog of interviews go live on InfoQ in coming weeks, like my recent interview on cloud architectures with Netflix’s Adrian Cockcroft.

Another tidbit on me is that I spent nearly 10 years at Dr. Dobb’s Journal, where I clawed my way from technical editor to eventually become the executive editor. The rest is pretty typical, I owned a training and consulting company specializing in XML, worked as a programmer at NASA, and on language compilers (C++, Pascal and Prolog) at a long-deceased company called Borland. In other words, blah, blah, blah.

What’s cool (and personally exciting for me) is that I’m here, and I’ll be sharing my insights into PaaS, discussing multitenant architecture, and musing over issues like CAP Theorem. For this first blog entry I’d just like to share my “Hello, World” experience with the Developer Force platform, which can be summed up with the number five. Five minutes to setup a DE account and create your first app. Five clicks and a few keystrokes to create an app with a label that says “Hello, World.” And with that comes a huge amount of functionality—I have a complete interface that allows me to quickly create records for Mercury, Venus, Mars and all the other planets I want to greet with my simple message. I have built-in reporting, dashboards, access to Chatter and a good deal more. Moreover, I have the beginnings of a cloud application backed by a multitenant architecture with all the benefits multi-tenancy affords. That’s pretty awesome.

In the coming months I’ll be sharing my development experiences, and some failures, in the hopes that others can learn. But blogging isn’t my only gig around. I’m hoping to do a great many other things, like building a larger library of technical articles that will educate, enlighten, and even provoke you into trying things you haven’t considered before. And with Spring ’13 on our doorstep there’s plenty of new things to cover.

Finally Developer Force is always on the lookout for quality articles and encourages practitioners and domain experts to submit feature-length articles. Our readers value articles that are timely, educational and practical. Articles should be timely because Developer Force tracks important and significant trends within our community. Educational means that articles should teach our readers something non-trivial. Practical means that readers should take away processes and practices that can be applied in their daily work. So, if you have an idea for an article that you think the community would benefit from, I’d like to hear from you.

In the meantime, stay tuned and stay connected.