Conferences

JCrete 2024

Attending JCrete has become a tradition for me. It is high up there among my favorite events and probably my favorite location. Whenever possible, I take some time off before or after the conference to explore the Island of Crete.

Every day at JCrete starts with a morning run. You have to be up early for this as it gets very hot very quickly and the hills above the OAC are pretty steep.

But JCrete is about so much more than the running, the location, the food….It’s all about the people! And the conversations. It is not often you get to spend a week in the company of such a group of dignitaries of the Java community in such relaxed circumstances. If you ever get the chance to attend JCrete, just do it!

Since JCrete is an unconference, there are no scheduled talks. The topics for the sessions are presented and voted on every morning and the schedule materializes from that. An interesting observation is that the topics on the first and second days are usually very technical, low-level JVM stuff. Whereas later in the week, the softer topics of remote working, burnout, traveling, and coping with various work situations are more common.

After JCrete, there is no better place to be than on a beach with coffee in the making and delicious Cretan thyme honey on Greek yogurt.

JConf Dominicana 2024

A Java conference in the Dominican Republic sounds too good to be true. Well, I can tell you that it is a thing, and it is awesome! JConf Dominicana, The Caribbean Java Technologies Conference is organized by Java Dominicano, the Dominican Java User Group. It is a one-day conference with a half day of workshops the day before.

I hosted a 4-hour Jakarta EE workshop together with Eudris Cabrera. He provided Spanish translations of all the instructions for the participants and explained in Spanish where my English came short. We had a great time, and it looks like the participants enjoyed it as well if you judge from the happy faces in this photo.

Jakarta EE was very well represented at JConfDominicana this year. In addition to the workshop, Shabnam did a keynote titled Empowering Innovation: The Open Source Odyssey of Contribution and Collaboration with Jakarta EE.

The day before the conference, we went out to explore the city and ended up visiting a cigar factory where they had free tours of the facilities. It is amazing to see how cigars are hand-made this way. Our clothes will need a turn in the washer after the visit as almost everyone in there was smoking cigars while working.

It is always such a great experience to speak at conferences like JConfDominica that are organized by and for the local Java Community. I encourage everyone who employs Java developers anywhere in the world to support the local Java community.

Developer Week ’24

Developer Week is a four-day conference that takes place in Nuremberg, Germany. As the name implies, it is a developer conference where Java is a track among the other track topics. I spoke at the conference for the first time in 2017, and it feels like the Java track has increased in size since then even if it is still a small part of the conference. Anyway, it is very useful to be present at these non-100%-Java conferences as well. As Brian pointed out, they are coping with the same problems and challenges as the Java community. Talking about Brian, here we are as we are following Jonathan‘s presentation.

Jonathan brought his daughter with him on this trip, and she go the task of evaluating the various speakers’ presentation skills. It will be interesting to see how well I perform on stage in the eyes of a 14-year-old girl. Hopefully, my bribe in the form of some exclusive Jakarta EE swag will improve my evaluation.

My talk From Spring Boot 2 to Spring Boot 3 with Java 22 and Jakarta EE went well. I even demoed Jakarta Data at the end of the talk.

Before the conference day, I went for a morning run around Nürnberg. there is a nice walk/bike path on the outside of the old city walls that is perfect for running.

DevBCN 2024

My second trip to Barcelona in less than two weeks was to DevBCN. This community-driven conference is always a pleasure to speak at. And it doesn’t hurt that it is located in Barcelona…

This time we had an Eclipse Foundation booth staffed by Carmen, Arjan, and yours truly. We even had some new Jakarta EE swag in the shape of caps and sunglasses. A fun moment was to have a selfie with Jean-Fredric from the ASF where he was wearing his vintage jakarta.apache.org t-shirt and me with my Jakarta EE t-shirt.

Despite some issues with the screens, I was able to start my talk at the scheduled time. This time, I dusted off the popular From Spring Boot 2 to Spring Boot 3 with Java 22 and Jakarta EE talk. Every time I do this talk, the number of attendees raising their hand when I ask who that has already done the migration is increasing. A bit surprising this time was that there were more hands raised for “not started yet”. So the talk is still valid, and I will most likely continue presenting it for a while longer.

Originally, I was supposed to do the one talk this year, but since there were cancelations from some speakers not being able to come, I was asked if I could do a second talk. The one I chose to do was an update of what to expect from Jakarta EE 11, and how this release will help you boost both performance and developer productivity.

Spring I/O 2024

This was my first time attending and speaking at Spring I/O. The conference is located in Barcelona and attracts around 1200 attendees from all over the World. The two-day conference has four parallel tracks as well as two workshop tracks.

Spring I/O is an extremely well-organized conference. Everything flows smoothly, both before and during the conference. I felt really welcomed and appreciated as a speaker. The whole event has a great community spirit. I will definitely submit a talk or two when the CFP for Spring I/O 2025 opens up!

I had a great time presenting Why Spring Matters to Jakarta EE – and Vice Versa at Spring I/O. The crowd was engaging, and I had a lot of good conversations about the topic afterward. Even if I most likely was the only one wearing a Jakarta EE T-shirt at this Spring event, I didn’t feel alone at all. The Java community is the same anywhere, warm and welcoming.

No conference without a morning run, and Spring I/O was no exception. On day 2, Abdel, Ash, and I had a nice 7K run around Barcelona. A refreshing start of the day.

JPrime 2024

JPrime in Sofia is one of my favorite conferences. The event has two tracks, which means that you always have a good crowd even if there is a superstar speaker in the other room at the same time. The venue has a big outdoor patio and is surrounded by a park, so it is possible to enjoy some time in the sun between the talks, or if you need to escape the buzz in the exhibition area for a little while.

My talk at JPrime this year was The Final Frontier of Web Development – React Server Components vs Jakarta EE. In the demo section, I take the audience on a tour of what someone may call old-school technologies and compare them to modern equivalents. Rather than old-school, I would call them solid technologies that stand the test of time.

An outcome of this talk is that I am inspired to create an abstract for a new talk that continues down this path, but more on the benefits of separation of concerns and that the business logic belongs on the server.

In the morning before the first day of the conference, I did a morning run with Cay and Michael. Directly after this photo was taken, it started raining. And pretty soon it was pouring down. Michael was our guide for this run, and he took us on a loop in the nearby forest. Despite the rain fogging up his glasses, making navigation difficult, we made it back in time for breakfast.

Submit Your Talk to Open Community for Java 2024

I’ll let you in on a little secret about how to increase your chances of getting accepted to speak at a conference. It is as simple as this: Submit Early!

Most conferences either accept talks on a rolling basis or have an expressed early-bird acceptance. Since most speakers tend to submit at a date near the CFP deadline, the amount of talks available to choose from is less for early-bird selections than for the regular selection after the CFP has ended. Which in turn increase YOUR chances at getting accepted if you are among those few submitting early.

The early-bird deadline for Open Community for Java is set to May 31, 2024. Submit your talk before that date to increase your chances of getting accepted. You can still submit more talks up until the final submission deadline of June 10, 2024.

GeeCON 2024

My visit to beautiful Kraków for GeeCON 2024 was a pretty short one since it was the second conference I spoke at in two days. And I wasn’t the only speaker taking the route between Köln and Kraków, or the other way around. That’s how it is during conference season.

I did a brand new talk at GeeCON called The Final Frontier of Web Development – React Server Components vs Jakarta EE. I think it went fairly well despite the fact that I am on a little thin ice when it comes to the bleeding edge of JavaScript frameworks. I think I got the message through that this industry is on this eternal hamster wheel reinventing things over and over again with a new cooler name.

Before going over to the conference, I went for a nice morning run in the park on the outskirts of Kraków. May is the best month to visit this city. It is warm and sunny, but not too hot yet.

GeeCON is a very friendly and well-run conference by organizers that truly make you feel welcome. There is a lot of socializing among the speakers, attendees, and organizers.

JCON Europe 2024

JCON Europe is a four-day Java conference attracting speakers from all over the World and Java developers from all over Germany. The venue is a cinema complex located centrally in Cologne (Köln), Germany.

This year, Eclipse Foundation had a booth at a very prominent location where the Java-related working groups, members, and projects were showcased.

My talk titled Prepare for Jakarta EE 11 – Performance and Developer Productivity was scheduled for Thursday morning. I had a very engaging audience with good comments and questions following the presentation.

On Wednesday morning, we had a refreshing morning run before the conference started. The best way to get energized before a conference day.

GIDS 2024

My fifth time speaking at GIDS was just as good as the previous ones. The conference has an amazing lineup of high-profile speakers, so it is a great honor to be among them. This year, the conference had 5400 attendees spread over four days with five parallel tracks.

I had a packed room for my talk titled From Spring Boot 2 to Spring Boot 3 with Java 21 and Jakarta EE. One of the great things about this conference, and maybe the main reason why I keep coming back to it, is that the audience is so engaged. They are not afraid to ask relevant questions during as well as after the talk. I am also very often approached while roaming the exhibition hall by attendees that want to talk about the talk or other topics of interest.

In one of the breaks, I was interviewed by Cassandra Chin for Techstrong TV. We chatted about open source and how getting involved in open source can be a game changer for your career as a developer. The interview should air on their website within a couple of days or so.

Bangalore is known as the Garden City of India with green areas spread around everywhere between the buildings. It can be very hot in Bangalore in April. This year, the temperature was in the high thirties (celsius). Luckily the hotel had a pool to soak in after the conference days.