Peter A. Pilgrim is the 91st Oracle Java Champion, an independent contractor, a professional software developer and designer. Peter is an honors degree graduate of London South Bank University in 1990. He had already secured a Master's degree course for September 1991, but then instead elected to live and work in Germany for a few years in order to beat off the then, economic recession. He spent productive years at a joint-venture company developing spectroscopic scientific software in Fortran 77, C, Solaris, and X Windows.
After four years abroad Peter returned to London and continued his career in the industry with more C, C++, and UNIX development. He then leapt at a chance to get into investment banking with Deutsche Bank in 1998. It was at Deutsche Bank a week after joining them that Peter discovered Java was the next best thing since sliced bread, when a colleague dropped out of a programming Java training course. As the substitute person, Peter realized this peculiar Java language and platform was the future and the answer. Peter applied his studies to his day job and learnt Java applets, then Java Swing and switched over to the server side with Java Servlets with web applications involving the Struts framework.
In 2004, Peter created the JAVAWUG user group in London for the burgeoning development community who were interested in web development on the Java EE. What started as the Struts Networking Users Group in London quickly expanded to lot of other areas. The JAVAWUG ran for six years until 2010. He built a reputation for travelling to Java technology conferences in the US and Europe and being heavily involved in the wider community. He spoke at several developer conferences including QCon London, ACCU, Devoxx, Devoxx UK, and JavaOne. In 2007, Peter was elected to the Sun Microsystems' Java Champions program.
Today, Peter A. Pilgrim is a well-known specialist in Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) technology, focused on the server-side and the implementation of electronic commerce. Peter has built professional Java EE applications for Blue-chip companies and top-tier investment and retail banks including Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays, UBS, Credit Suisse, Royal Bank of Scotland, and LBi. He is also a fan of Agile practices and Test Driven Development. Peter, currently, lives in South London with his long-term partner Terry, who is a Scottish Diva, business communication coach, and a singer—her voice is phenomenal.
Peter writes a blog at http://www.xenonique.co.uk/blog/ and is on Twitter as peter_pilgrim.