Every week here and in our newsletter, we feature a new developer/blogger from the DZone community to catch up and find out what he or she is working on now and what's coming next. This week we're talking to Bob Buck, Solutions Architect at NuoDB.

1. What have you been working on lately?

Lately I've been polishing up the Pentaho integrations; whereas formally I created a Pentaho PDI (ETL) and published it to the Pentaho Marketplace, now I have been working with the Pentaho team on getting the Pentaho BI integration published; we have an integration on their MASTER branch on Github, but we are now focussed on getting the patch onto the Lagunitas branch so that NuoDB becomes part of the commercial Pentaho BI summer release. I have fun writing NuoDB integrations while my wife Theresa and I watch Bletchley Circle on BBC.

2. NuoDB 2.0.4 was just released. Are there any new features that you're particularly excited about?

For sales, 2.0.4 is all about stability, so concretely seeing applications for NailSoup and others run flawlessly are the top priorities. As such I've been very hard pressed to see the product fail in recent builds of NuoDB and it's been performing well overall. This is a huge gain in stability, a great leap forward by engineering. Congrats to all who made this possible.

3. Are there any particular developer tools or resources you couldn't live without?

For developer tools I tend to use IntelliJ and RubyMine quite a bit for development, sprinkled with a bit of Sublime and TextMate. For merge tools, I love Araxis Merge. All that said, the two tools I could not survive without is VI and sed.

4. Do you have a favorite open source project (or projects) that you've contributed to recently?

My favorite open source project is perhaps Storm; I find Storm rather fascinating, and I've written some sentiment analysis topologies for New England Patriots tweets. Otherwise others that I've been working with recently are Pentaho, Mondrian, Slick, Liquibase, Flyway, to name a few.

5. Do you follow any blogs or Twitter feeds that you would recommend to developers?

Twitter, what's that?

6. Did you have a coding first love -- a particular program, gadget, game, or language that set you on the path to life as a developer?

The main draw for me into software development was creating software that has real impact on people's productivity and lives. C++/OO were a vehicles to achieve those goals early on in my career (late 80's through early 2000's), but since then I've become a bit of a language divorcee, favoring other models instead.

Thanks, Bob!