This year, we are expanding the Community Day concept at EclipseCon with Community for Java Developers. It is a full day filled with talks, demos, and discussions in two tracks with a focus on open-source, vendor-neutral technologies in the Java space.
(If you are attending EclipseCon, you can add the Community Day pass for only €25)
Community Day for Java Developers is scheduled for Monday, October 16 in Ludwigsburg, Germany. Take this opportunity to visit this beautiful city, conveniently located just 12 kilometers north of Stuttgart in Southwestern Germany.
GOTO Amsterdam 2023 was a really great experience! It was my first time speaking at a GOTO conference. In addition to Amsterdam, the GOTO conferences are organized in Chicago, Aarhus, and Copenhagen.
The venue, Beurs van Berlage is absolutely stunning. And the food is in the top tier of conference food. Usually, not a very hard list to climb on, but GOTO Amsterdam is definitely among the best.
My talk about Jakarta EE 10 with an additional demo of how to cope with the javax.* to jakarta.* namespace change in Spring was well attended. Check out the slides here.
As always when I go to conferences, I bring my running shoes and invite everyone to join me for a morning run. This time was no exception. Holly and I did a 5K run along the streets of Amsterdam in the light drizzling rain. Holly forgot her socks, so luckily I brought her a pair.
JPrime is a very friendly conference that is a pleasure to speak at. This year it attracted around 1250 attendees, and with two parallel tracks, all speakers get a decent crown in their presentations.
The venue is great, with an outdoor area to escape the crowds in the exhibition area and enjoy the Sofia sun in between sessions.
No conference without #runWithJakartaEE. JPrime was no exception. We had a morning run before each of the two conference days in addition to the day after the conference. The runners were Yarden, Emily, Grace, Heinz, Tagir, and me as you can see in the gallery below.
This was my second time speaking at Infoshare in Gdańsk, Poland. The conference is pretty huge. Rumor has it they were expecting more than 6500 participants over two days, and the exhibition floor was absolutely massive!
With a focus on startups, investors, marketers, and the like, the audience on the DEV JAVA stage was, as expected, a little limited. Most of the stages, DEV JAVA included, were located in the exhibition hall. The sound system was pretty good, so it was not really a problem for the attendees to follow a talk. But as a speaker, it is very disturbing with all that background noise.
The most important track at any conference is the hallway track where you meet and network with new and old friends in the community. As depicted by Iris Classon, Reza Rahman, Adam Bien, Gerrit Grunwald, and myself here.
The hotel where most of the speakers stayed was located close to a park that is perfect for running. True to tradition, I invited everyone that wanted to join me in exchange for a Jakarta EE running T-shirt. This time Grzegorz Pinowarek joined me for a real forest trail experience in the woods.
Devoxx Greece 2023 was the first time Devoxx was arranged in Greece. The conference has been around for a couple of years as Voxxed Days Athens and stepped up to become a part of the Devoxx family this year. The 1200 attendees show that this was the right step to take. About 25 percent of the attendees came from other countries making it a true international conference.
The venue is very flexible and was just about right-scaled for this year’s number of attendees. With the option of taking more and bigger rooms in use, it has the possibility to scale for future events.
Thanks to Donald Raab for taking this photo of me in front of the Acropolis during the walking tour that was organized for the speakers that arrived the day before the conference.
GIDS is a well-organized conference over four days with around 1200 attendees every day, some attending one day and others several days. One cool thing about this conference is the posters they set up outside the rooms with pictures of the speaker, title, and time for the talk. These posters offer an excellent opportunity for a selfie as demonstrated here.
Even if speaking at conferences is mostly hard work, there are opportunities for some relaxation in between, and India is not a bad place to be for those occasions. I enjoyed the fruit buffet, shopping for spices, and getting in a couple of laps in the pool at the hotel.
Devnexus is one of the absolute highlights of every conference year, and the 2023 edition was no exception. It truly is the place to be for the Java Community.
In addition to the dedicated Jakarta EE track featuring two days packed with amazing talks, we also had a booth where we had conversations about Jakarta EE as well as handed out swag. In addition to the usual stickers and t-shirts, we also had 5-year anniversary branded socks that proved to be extremely popular.
Speaking about the anniversary, at the end of the first conference day, we served 5-year anniversary cake at the booth.
My talk titled Jakarta EE for Spring Developers was well attended. With about sixty percent of the attendees being Spring developers, the topic hit the mark. In addition to pointing out how closely related Spring and Jakarta EE are, the major part of the talk is a demo where I migrate an application from Spring Boot 2 to Spring Boot 3 with a focus on what to think of related to the namespace change from javax.* to jakarta.* and how it impacts Spring and Spring Boot.
And, of course, whenever possible, I invite everyone to join me in a Jakarta EE Community Morning Run before the conference day starts. This time, we did a community run on both Wednesday and Thursday mornings.
Next week is the week of Devnexus 2023! And the conference this year features a dedicated track to Jakarta EE that is packed with amazing content from world-class speakers. Not only the Jakarta EE Track, the conference has an amazing lineup as always. This is one of the reasons why Devnexus has sailed up to become the biggest and most important Java conference in the US.
Conferences can be exhausting, with long days at the venue. So many people to talk to, and so many talks to attend. I find that the best way to make sure that you are refreshed and recharged for a conference day is a morning run. That’s why I will arrange the first annual Jakarta EE Devnexus Community Run. In fact, while we’re at it, let’s do the second as well. Join me for a run on both Wednesday and Thursday mornings!
When – 06:30am, Wednesday, April 5, 2023 – 06:30am, Thursday, April 6, 2023
Where – By the Olympic Rings at the corner of Centennial Olympic Park
This was my ninth JavaLand! Since the conference was canceled in 2020, I have spoken at every JavaLand since it started in 2014, including the online edition of 2021. It is safe to say that it is one of my favorite conferences, and I hope to return again and again!
This year, Eclipse Foundation had a booth where we showcased Jakarta EE and Adoptium. I had a blast talking to all the people that came and visited me at the booth.
My Jakarta EE 10 talk was very well attended. I had the pleasure of presenting in Wintergarten, which is the second-biggest stage at JavaLand. Unfortunately, my development environment acted up on one of the demos, but the rest of the talk went without any issues.
Directly after my regular conference talk, I moderated the Jakarta EE Panel with Ed Burns, Emily Jiang, and Jan Westerkamp as the panelists. We had a couple of topics prepared and got some good questions from the audience as well.
And, last but not least. No conference with Emily without a morning run. At JavaLand, we were both dressed up in our nice Jakarta EE running shirts, as well as the limited Jakarta EE neck warmers.
My third time speaking at ConFoo was as pleasant as the previous two occasions. The three-day conference is packed with great content from a superb speaker lineup. The venue is perfectly scaled for the 720 attendees. And the food…OMG… the three-course lunches remind you that the conference is in Montreal!
Talking about Montreal. It can be cold in February. But even so, the hotel has an outdoor heated pool, hot tub, and sauna. So even if it is below -20 degrees celsius, you can still enjoy an outdoor swim when the sessions are over.
My second talk was a non-technical one titled How to Be a Responsible Open Source Citizen. This is an inspirational talk aimed at getting more people to invest in and contribute to open source projects. This one also received great feedback, and I had some really good conversations afterward.
I would also like to thank SpeakerDeck for extending my upload quota so I am able to publish my slide decks there again. Since I reached the limit a couple of months ago, I have been forced to use another service for a while. But now I am back at SpeakerDeck. By the way, they didn’t ask me to write this or anything else in return for extending the quota…
