Conferences

ConFoo 2023

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.

I had two talks at ConFoo 2023. The first one was Jakarta EE 10 – Simplicity for Modern and Lightweight Cloud. The room was full, and I got great feedback from the attendees.

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…

DeveloperWeek 2023

I have visited San Francisco multiple times before, but this is the first time I have been to Oakland which is just across San Francisco Bay. The city, a short ferry ride from its more famous neighbor, has its charm and is definitely worth a visit if you’re in the area. It is also my first time speaking at DeveloperWeek at the Oakland Convention Center.

My talk titled Jakarta EE for Spring Developers went well. All the demos worked as expected, which is a good thing since the better part of the talk consisted of live demos. The talk was scheduled as the first talk on the first day of the conference, the so-called workshop day, so the attendance was a little lower than expected. But the attendees seemed happy and I got comments that it was very relevant and helpful for them as they were just about to start their migration from Spring Boot 2 to Spring Boot 3.

Another highlight of my DeveloperWeek 2023 experience was receiving the 2023 DEVIES Award for Jakarta EE 10 in the Programming Languages & Frameworks category. The award trophy was handed out during the DEVIES Award ceremony on the first day of the conference.

Jfokus 2023

Jfokus is one of my absolute favorite conferences. This year’s edition was no exception. The organization is excellent, you can tell that they’ve done this before. This was the 17th edition of Jfokus since it started back in 2007.

On Wednesday morning, we continued the tradition that started last year with a Jfokus Morning Run. Which made this year the second annual morning run at Jfokus.

We were 17 runners that met at 07:15 on Wednesday morning for a 5K run, and as far as I know all 17 returned and were able to attend the conference. It is truly an excellent way to start a conference day.

I had a Quickie-talk about responsible Open Source at Jfokus this year. A Quickie talk at Jfokus is a 15-minute talk, so it is pretty fast-paced. A fun experience. And I hope the participants found it interesting as well. The room was almost full, so the topic seems interesting at least.

jChampionsConf 2023

This was the third edition of jChampionsConf. As the name implies, all speakers of this conference are Java Champions. The 100% virtual four-day conference (January 19, 20, 23, and 24) is available on the JChampions Conference YouTube channel.

Don’t worry if you missed a talk when it was LIVE. You can always go back and check it out at any time on YouTube!

Since I didn’t have a talk at this year’s edition, I volunteered as moderator for Has the J2EE vs Spring Infinity War reached an End Game? A short history of Java for the enterprise by Antoine Sabot-Durand. It was a very good talk where Antoine took us through the major events from the 20-year history of Enterprise Java. I highly recommend it!

THAT Conference 2023

It was my first time attending and speaking at THAT Conference. It is a three-day conference at the Kalahari Resorts and Convention Center in Round Rock, Texas. The original conference in Wisconsin has been going on for years, and this was the second time it was organized in Texas. It is an intimate and very well-organized conference. The crew certainly know what they are doing. It doesn’t hurt that it is organized in a waterpark either…

One of the things they do is to organize daily 5K morning runs. Thanks to Josh Gretz for organizing!

My talk was titled How to Be a Responsible Open Source Citizen. This is a brand new talk on a topic I have been thinking about a lot lately. It is different from the talks I usually do in that it didn’t contain a demo. This may sound like a relief for a speaker, but I kind of feel otherwise. Speaking for an hour just being backed by slides is more challenging than being able to lean on a demo to make it engaging. Check out the slides from my talk.

I really enjoyed my visit to Round Rock and THAT Conference, Texas and will certainly put it on my calendar over potential conferences next year as well. Next year’s conference will be January 29 – February 1, 2024.

The Conference Year 2022

I don’t think we will ever experience anything like 2022 regarding conferences. This was the year we all went back to meeting in person after the two dark years of the pandemic. As one of the privileged able to travel to speak at a significant number of conferences, I got to experience firsthand the joy, relief, and happiness from organizers, speakers, and attendees that we were back to meeting again.

As you can see from the heap of badges, it was a busy year. Since I wrote a short write-up after each event, I won’t repeat that here. You can check out the individual reports here:

I always bring my running shoes with me when I travel. That way, I can get out to explore the area while exercising. It is the perfect way to start a conference day. Whenever practical, I invited conference attendees to join me on these Jakarta EE Community Runs. Take a look at the video we showed as a part of JakartaOne Livestream 2022.

I am happy to share that I just received a new batch of the beautiful, and very popular, Jakarta EE lightweight running shirts to bring along to conferences in 2023. And it doesn’t stop there, this batch of shirts includes women’s sizes!
Join me for Jakarta EE Community Runs in 2023 to get one, and get in shape at the same time!

JakartaOne Livestream 2022

The fourth annual JakartaOne Livestream is a wrap! And what a show! I think it is safe to say that this was the best JakartaOne Livestream ever as we up our game from year to year. It kind of puts a little pressure on us for next year’s event, but I think we are up to it. Save the date for the fifth edition of JakartaOne Livestream on December 5, 2023.

This was the first year we could all be in the same location during the show. It really helps to have the greenroom for speaker preparations, the production team, and the Studio Jakarta EE co-located. This year Serena and Samantha helped out with the speaker preparations while Shabnam, Tanja, and I could focus on the Studio Jakarta EE sessions. Everything was kept on schedule and controlled by our excellent producer Ian, who also created all the graphics, transitions, and videos for the event.

We all gathered at Tanja’s house at 05:00 and kept on going until the closing session at 19:00. Such an effort requires a lot of energy. As you can see in the picture below, Shabnam and Serena are making sure the 3 meters of pizza are properly documented.

Last year, my flight got delayed due to a winter storm, so I almost missed the opening. So this year, I decided to come over a day earlier to be on the safe side. This in turn made room for a Sunday morning run in Gatineau Park with Paul. We were wearing our Jakarta EE shirts underneath our jackets if anyone were in doubt.

Øredev 2022

Øredev is a well-established conference that has been around since 2005. As you may see from the beautiful social card created for my talk, the theme for this year was Alice in Wonderland.

The conference was, as always true to its theme. The room I was assigned was called Upstairs and was located upstairs. Next to it, there was a room named Downstairs but was still located upstairs. Confusing? Well, luckily enough the conference website had a locator map and I guess the attendees figured it out since I had an almost full room for my session.

Check out the slides for my talk titled Attention Java Developers – Everything YOU need to Know About Jakarta EE 10.

As most of you know, getting decent coffee can be a problem at most conferences. Øredev is an exception. There is a barista in the corner of the exhibition floor that brews the most exquisite coffee. They do charge a little for it, but one of the perks of being a speaker is that you get it for free by showing the speaker badge.

As speakers, we are also invited to a speaker dinner in the splendid Malmö City Hall. A nice way to start the conference week!

Hack.Commit.Push Paris 2022

Hack.Commit.Push 2022 in Paris on November 5 was a one-day event where the goal was to help the participants to get started by contributing to an open-source project of their choice.

The goal of the event is that the participants should be able to have contributed something to an open-source project by the end of the day. The projects at this event were:

The Eclipse Starter for Jakarta EE is a source code generator for Jakarta EE projects. The current version is using Maven archetypes to generate a starting point for Jakarta EE application development. The starter can be found at start.jakarta.ee.

At Hack.Commit.Push 2022 in Paris, I worked on the starter together with Clarence Dimitri Charles. During the event, he was able to contribute the Profile selector in the UI, as well as the associated functionality in the archetype for Jakarta EE 10.

Events like Hack.Commit.Push are extremely useful to get community involvement in open-source. It is important that the projects participating have a low entry barrier so it is possible to get enough of an understanding quickly to be able to make a contribution in a couple of hours. The Eclipse Starter for Jakarta EE, with its simple architecture, is a great example of such a project. I hope to be able to participate in lots of events like this in the future. There are lots of projects within the Jakarta EE ecosystem that could fit well in this model.

J-FALL 2022

1800 attendees at a one-day conference is impressive! J-Fall is organised by NLJUG as a truly community oriented event. Conference passes for NLJUG members are free.

The J-Fall 2022 speaker lineup was amazing, and I am proud to be a part of it. My session titled Modern and Lightweight Cloud Application Development with Jakarta EE 10 was very well attended and I got a lot of good questions afterwards. Maybe motivated by the t-shirts handed out to the first three attendees to ask a question…

Between the talks I was able to pop by the local store and stock up on Stroopwafels. It should help remind me that Dutch Sushi is not a thing, and I better use Stroopwafels next time I do a demo in the Netherlands