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.

We had the Jakarta EE Office Hours on the second day of EclipseCon 2023. The concept of office hours is to let attendees ask questions directly to the Eclipse Foundation staff involved in a particular area during scheduled slots. Since it is during sessions, it wasn’t exactly hectic. I had more conversations about Jakarta EE during the regular hallway track. But it is a great concept, so we will likely repeat it next year.

The Eclipse Foundation Architecture Council had a face-to-face meeting. The topic this year was the generation of SBOMs. An outcome of this discussion was that I have now created a pull request to add SBOM-generation in the parent pom.xml for all the Jakarta EE specifications and EE4J implementation projects. This means that the upcoming Jakarta EE 11 release will be delivering SBOMs for the released artifacts.,

In the evening, we had the Committer Recognition Reception, where the committers to the Eclipse Foundation projects were celebrated and could receive their committer gift. This year, it is a nice pocket knife. Luckily, there was an option to get it sent home by mail since knives and airport security usually don’t mix well…

Six early risers joined for the EclipseCon Community Run on the second day. We quickly split into two groups, hence two photos. It was a pretty cold morning, so the Jakarta EE branded buffs (neckwarmers) came in handy.

On the first day of EclipseCon 2023, Tanja and I had a three-hour Jakarta EE Workshop. Since this was the very first time we did this workshop, we were a little unsure of it would go. It turned out to go very well, even if the material was a little too extensive. Most participants were able to complete about half of the tasks during the three hours. But since it is a self-paced workshop, they will be able to complete it at any time later.

The rest of the conference day was mostly filled by the hallway track for my part. It is the best way to engage with new and old friends in the community.

#runWithJakartaEE is everywhere, and at EclipseCon there is an opportunity to run every morning. The informal Emily challenge is to join the run every day of the conference. Usually, Emily is the only one able to complete the challenge and wins it every year. Hence the name.
On day two of EclipseCon 2023, Emily and I were joined by Gesine and Gaël.