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.

First day at @jcon_conference , in the @EclipseFdn area. Our team at the @JakartaEE and @glassfish booth, explaining why Jakarta EE is great and what modern GlassFish has to offer.#Jcon #GlassFishStrikesBack #GlassFishSupport #JakartaEE pic.twitter.com/vSCGOpEFiF

— OmniFish EE (@OmniFishEE) May 14, 2024

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.

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.

We have struggled a little bit to get the Malmö JUG up and running again after the pandemic, but now it seems like we are on the roll again. The goal is to have at least one event each quarter, and the February 29 event yesterday was a great start. We usually have two talks per event, and this was no exception.

The first talk was about Continuous Integration Patterns by Thomas Lundström. The second talk was a celebration talk about the 25 Years of the JCP Program presented by myself.

(I will add the slides from Thomas’ talk when he has made them available)

Going forward we will aim for one talk per event. Most people attend for the mingle and discussion anyway. We will see how it turns out and maybe reevaluate next year.

By the way, we are always looking for speakers, so please let me know if you have a talk you want to present, and are eager for a trip to beautiful Malmö. Conveniently located close to Copenhagen Airport (CPH).

JakartaOne Livestream 2023 was the fifth edition of the conference. The setup of Studio Jakarta EE has improved year-for-year, and now closely resembles a professional TV studio. After the seemingly unavoidable network issues at the beginning, everything worked flawlessly.

It is so much fun getting together for a production like this. Super stressful, yes. But it is also so much more rewarding to be in the same room doing it rather than putting it together remotely. I hope the spirit in the studio reached those watching the streams as well. Just take a look at this video for a feeling of how much fun we had.

All the talks and Studio Jakarta EE sessions will be made available shortly on our Youtube channels for everyone to watch, or watch again.

Everyone involved did a fantastic job pulling it together. Serena and Samantha took care of the speakers and Ian produced the entire thing while Shabnam, Tanja, and I were hosting the Studio Jakarta EE. Here is the whole crew at the after-conference dinner. A little tired after 12 hours of continuous work, but still happy. Already planning for JakartaOne Livestream 2024…

Kin of out of the blue, I was invited to speak at JCON WORLD ONLINE 2023. And not only a regular talk but the keynote of the EclipseStore Summit on the last day of the conference.

It was kind of a last-minute thing and I didn’t have time to create a brand new talk, so I revamped my Responsible Open Source talk to fit with the keynote format. You can check out the slides of Open Source – A Journey of Contribution and Collaboration here.

At the end of the keynote, I invited Markus Kett, the CEO of MictroStream on the stage (or in this case the screen) to talk about EclipseStore.

EclipseStore is a persistence layer for databaseless persistence, built for cloud-native microservices and serverless systems. It is a new project under the Eclipse Foundation. It has just released its first version, so go ahead and try it out. And, even better, take a look at the code in GitHub and start contributing.

Øredev is my local conference, and I can go by bike if the weather permits. But as everyone visiting Sweden in November knows, the weather is pretty volatile at this time of the year. This year, I did go by bike on Wednesday but had to resort to the bus on Friday morning.

Øredev has a mix of local and international speakers and is an extremely diverse conference when it comes to topics covered with Java as a prominent one.

I had two talks accepted to Øredev 2023, both scheduled on Friday. This made it possible for me to attend the conference on Wednesday, speak at J-Fall on Thursday, and be back for my talks on Friday.

The first talk was the migrating from Spring Boot 2 to Spring Boot 3 talk which has turned out to be my most accepted talk this year. It is a fun talk to do with live coding along with the slides.

Ten minutes later, I was on stage again for my second talk of the day. This talk titled How to Be a Responsible Open Source Citizen is a non-technical talk meant to inspire developers to engage themselves in Open Source. It also has some pointers on how to get started, and what to think of when starting an open source journey.

J-FALL is the biggest Java conference in the Netherlands. The 2023 edition was the 20th edition and had 1800 attendees registered. It is impressive for a one-day conference! The conference is organized by NLJUG (Nederlandse Java User Group) and is free for members of the JUG.

The venue for the conference is Pathé Ede, which is a cinema complex situated in Ede, about an hour’s train ride from Amsterdam. The speaker lineup was impressive, as always, covering a wide range of topics.

My talk was titled Prepare for Jakarta EE 11. As the title indicates, it is an overview of what’s coming in Jakarta EE 11. I also gave a demo of Jakarta Data, the newest addition to Jakarta EE.

In addition to my talk, the hallway track, and participation in the Foojay Podcast, I also met David and Ron who have written a book on how to migrate from an earlier version of Java EE/Jakarta EE to Jakarta EE 10. The book is called Cloud-Native Development and Migration to Jakarta EE and is available from a bookstore near you.

J-FALL is one of my favorite conferences, and this was my fourth consecutive time speaking there. It is such a great community around it. Hopefully, I will be back next year and many more years to come…

I have written a daily recap from each day of EclipseCon 2023, and here’s the summary of it all. Don’t worry, I will not repeat myself.

It all started with Community Day on Monday, followed by three intense days of the regular EclipseCon from Tuesday through Thursday. Read all about each day in my daily posts during the conference:

Community Day
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3

One of the aspects that make EclipseCon special to me is that it is an opportunity to meet and socialize with my Eclipse Foundation colleagues. Since we are a distributed organization, EclipseCon is one of the few opportunities during a year that we can meet face-to-face. While it is not the primary objective of the conference, it is a very good add-on.

Day 3 of EclipseCon 2023 was a bit quieter than the previous ones. I guess some of the attendees returned home early after a couple of intense conference days.

Emily and I hosted a panel session about MicroProfile and Jakarta EE. Since the two of us were the only panelists, it turned into a dialogue on stage. In my opinion, this format works much better than a normal panel session with a moderator and all that comes with it. After a short introduction about what to expect from the next releases of Jakarta EE and MicroProfile, we started by asking each other questions we had prepared in advance. That is, we prepared them without letting the other know what we were going to ask until we asked the question on stage. We also mixed in questions from the audience as we went.

My talk titled Prepare for Jakarta EE 11 was fairly well attended taking into consideration that it was scheduled in one of the last slots of the conference. I gave an overview of what to expect from all the updated specifications in Jakarta EE 11. A little extra attention was given to Jakarta Data since this is the only new specification in this release, and there is already a working implementation out there to use in a demo. Check out the slides from the talk on SpeakerDeck.

And, no EclipsCon day without the morning run. This time, Emily, Gesine, and I had a very pleasant run in almost summer-like temperatures, or at least that is how it felt since it was about 10 degrees warmer than the previous days.