Introducing myself

[Ben Weidig]

Hello!

I'm new to the list and wanted to introduce myself and what I'm trying to
contribute to the OpenJDK.

Almost two decades ago, I started my professional career as a dotnet
developer at an international clinical research organization, learning the
ropes of "professional software development" and best practices.
For the last eight years, I'm running my own company, and Java became my
primary language.
My first "real" contact with open source contributions was last year when I
became a committer for Apache Tapestry.
It's great to give back to the community and not just "consuming" open
source.

Right now, I'm working on a book about a more functional approach to Java.
That lead me to read *a lot* of JDK source code to understand better how
certain types and features work.
And I believe I found some parts that could be improved, and that's what I
want to try to contribute.

For example, there's no feature-parity between the functional interfaces,
like regarding composition (Function<T> has 'compose' and 'andThen', other
related types only 'andThen'). Suppliers aren't composable at all.
And the specialized types for primitives differ even more.

Another group of types that piqued my interest are the Optional-types.
The primitive specializations lack multiple methods, like 'filter',
'flatMap', 'map', and 'or', compared to Optional<T>.
Also, a 'boxed()' method might increase the interoperability with other
Optional-based code.

The next steps for me will be reading up on the general process to
contribute and trying to get involved in the community.

Cheers,
Ben