2019 Summary

It is time for my yearly summary of conferences and community activities. In addition to numerous local meetups and online events, I had the opportunity to speak at the following major developer conferences:

Jfokus, Stockholm
Devnexus, Atlanta
ConFoo, Montreal
JavaLand, Brühl
JEEConf, Kiev
QCon, São Paulo
DevTalks, Bucharest
Java Cloud Africa, Johannesburg
J4K, Orlando
Oracle CodeOne, San Francisco
EclipseCon Europe, Ludwigsburg
Trondheim Developer Day, Trondheim
Devoxx Ukraine, Kiev
Devoxx Belgium, Antwerp
Devoxx Morocco, Agadir
Java2Days, Sofia

The biggest change for me this year happened in October when I joined the Eclipse Foundation as the Jakarta EE Developer Advocate. This means that I am able to dedicate all my time to community building and contributions to open source.

My new role enable me to be even more present at conferences and events around the World, so I expect 2020 to be at least as busy. I already have conferences lined up for the first quarter and more in the planning.

With Jakarta EE 8 out the door in 2019, we are now in full planning for Jakarta EE 9. The biggest impact of this release will be the namespace change from javax.* to jakarta.*. We will also prune some not very widely used technologies in order to lighten the burden for new implementations of the platform. This work will probably continue in subsequent releases.

All in all 2019 was a great year for Jakarta EE and I expect 2020 to be even better!

Oracle Groundbreaker APAC Tour 2018

This year, I was so lucky to get the chance to be part of the Oracle Groundbreaker APAC Tour 2018. The cities that I joined the tour was Perth and Melbourne in Australia as well as Wellington in New Zealand.

Perth, Australia

Copenhagen – (Singapore) – Perth
Gone swimming…

In Perth, I did a talk called Serverless with Java. I demoed various FaaS options available, including running Fn Project on Oracle Cloud. Between the sessions, I also managed to slip outside for a swim in the ocean.

Melbourne, Australia

Perth – Melbourne
New bush hat

In Melbourne, I had two sessions scheduled. The first was an informal Q&A with the local Java User Group. We had great discussions regarding the 6 months release cadence of Java, we discussed Jakarta EE and Eclipse MicroProfile and talked about Java development and Java user groups in general.

Later that afternoon, I did my Serverless with Java talk for a small, but an enthusastic crowd. 

Wellington, New Zealand

Melbourne – Wellington
Installing fn on OKE

The last stop on the journey was Wellington, New Zealand. Even here, it was the Serverless with Java talk that was put on the schedule.

To spice things up a little, I did a last minute try to get fn up and running on a managed Kubernetes cluster in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

I was close, so the next time I do this talk this will be part of the demos…

Wrap up

This was a fantastic trip, even considering the busy travel schedule and probably spending more time in the air or at airports than on the ground. The trip home from Wellington took ~36 hours door-to-door with short layovers in Auckland, Perth, and Singapore.

WLG – AKL
AKL – PER
PER – SIN
SIN – CPH

Source Code

The Function Duke project on GitHub contains all the source code for my serverless talks.

Flying High with Oracle Cloud

I recently joined the Oracle Developer Champion Program, and one of the benefits is that I get free credits to try out the various services offered by Oracle Cloud. As you see in the picture below, the credits just poured down on me yesterday 🙂

Will this hurt my reputation of being unbiased and vendor neutral when I talk about technologies?

Well, I certainly hope not! In that case, it should probably have gone long time ago since I already get free credits from other vendors, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, and more. The way I see it, is that it is an excellent opportunity to try out the different solutions and give them a fair comparison.

Stay tuned for more…

 

Summing up 2016…

…and looking forward to 2017!

2016 was a pretty eventful and great year for me personally. I had the opportunity to speak at a number of conferences including Jfokus, JavaLand, GIDS, CybercomDev, jPrime, Devoxx UK, JavaDay Minsk, JavaOne, JavaDay Kiev, Devoxx MA, Øredev. Links to talks and videos for most of these talks can be found on my Speaker Bio page.

I will continue speaking at conferences and events throughout 2017 as well. First up are Snowcamp.io, Devnexus, jDays, JavaLand, Riga Dev Days, DevDays Vilnius. And I still have some CFPs to submit talks to…

I also took over as JUG leader of Javaforum, the Java User Group in Malmö, and we had four meetings during 2016. The goal for 2017 is to continue with one meeting each quarter.

At the end of the year I won one of the associate seats in the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process. I am really looking forward to starting this work (I am actually going to London for our first face-to-face meeting tomorrow…).

If I should pick one single thing as the highlight of 2016, it would be the accepted to join the Java Champions. It was a surprise and an honor to be handed the Java Champions jacket from Arun Gupta at the closing Keynote of Devoxx UK.

Java Champion

I am extremely proud and honored to be included in this exclusive group of Java dignitaries.

The Java Champions are an exclusive group of passionate Java technology and community leaders who are community-nominated and selected under a project sponsored by Oracle. Learn more about Java Champions.

New Design

I have been thinking of freshening up the design of this blog for a while. The plan was to do it in a controlled manner with a proper backup first. But as we all know, everything does not necessarily happen according to plan in this industry. Sometimes a rm -rf * in a slightly unfortunate location has a tendency to speed up the process a bit…[1]

But, apart from a couple of missing images that will be added within the next couple of days, I think the result turned out pretty good!

[1] Can’t even blame the cat for sitting on the keyboard this time…

Building up to JavaOne

I am sitting at a Starbuck’s with a dark roast in my hand looking over some photos from Yesterday’s stroll in San Francisco. Some of them are pretty cool, so I’ll share them here…

What do you do with your boat after having won America’s Cup? Well, if your name is Larry you will probably use it as roof over a street you have closed for a week while hosting a party for 50-60.000 of your closest friends…

Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne
Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne

Howard Street
Howard Street

A Little Status Update

My schedule for the upcoming months are beginning to fill up as a result of submitting talks to a lot of CFPs during summer. The scheduled talks so far are:

There are still some room, so if you are organizing a conference and need talks to fill up, feel free to contact me. My profile on Lanyrd is kept updated at all time.

But first of all I am going to JavaOne! This year as an attendee, so it is all about networking, community building and interesting technical sessions and keynotes.

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