This was the 10th edition of Devoxx Morocco including the three pre-Devoxx-branded editions that were called JMaghreb. For me, it was my sixth visit to the conference, four times in Casablanca, once in Agadir, and this year in Taghazout.

On Friday, I had my talk titled From Spring Boot 2 to Spring Boot 3 with Java 21 and Jakarta EE. It was well received with good questions afterwards. One cool thing about Devoxx Morocco is that it is one of the few conferences where attendees regularly ask for a selfie with you. Kind of makes us feel like rockstars for a couple of seconds 🙂

Every conference should have a pool at the venue. It quickly turns the hallway track into a pool track, which is not a bad thing at all…

In between the sessions, food, and the pool track we had a couple of morning runs as well. Even spotted a camel on one of these runs. Maybe not a big deal in Morocco, but cool anyway.

My first time at an Apache Software Foundation event was a very pleasant experience. Community Over Code moves to different locations every year, and this year it was in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I would recommend visiting this lively city if you have the opportunity to it.

Community Over Code 2023 was a four-day conference. My talk titled Why Tomcat Matters for Jakarta EE on the second day was a brand new talk where I talked about the importance of Apache Tomcat for Jakarta EE. It was well received, and I had some good discussions with other attendees afterward.

The organizers had a couple of slots to fill due to unforeseen visa issues for some of the speakers, so I volunteered to fill one of them with my talk about migrating from Spring Boot 2 to Spring Boot 3. To make it more palatable to the ASF audience, I modified the title slightly as well as changed the demo to use the Tomcat Migration Tool for Jakarta EE rather than the Eclipse Transformer.

A small group of early risers met in the Lobby of one of the hotels every morning at 7 a.m. for a morning run with the catching slogan Community over Road. The only day we didn’t do the morning run was Sunday due to the remains of a tropical storm causing pretty heavy rain in the morning hours.

The 20th edition of Devoxx Belgium is a wrap! As always, an amazing conference with exceptional speakers providing state-of-the-art content. I was so lucky to get two sessions and a BOF into this year’s edition. The first talk was a brand new one about what’s coming in Jakarta EE 11. Check out the slides for this talk below. In the months to come, the deck will be updated according to the progress of the release, as well as more demos will be added to the talk.

Almost directly after this talk, I hosted thethe Jakarta EE Community BOF with Edwin Derks. These late night (after a long day at Devoxx 19:00 feels like late night) are rarely well attended. But the upside is that those that come are really interested and motivated, so the outcome is always great.

The second talk I had at this year’s Devoxx was very well attended. I guess it helps having Spring in the title. The talk I did was the one where I migrate an application based on Spring Boot 2 to Spring Boot 3 with focus on the namespace change introduced by Jakarta EE 9. Even the slides from this talk is linked below..

On Wednesday morning, a sporty gang of seven met up outside Antwerpen Central at 06:45 to go for a 5K morning run. In the spirit of celebrating Cinnamon Roll Day (October 4), I had planned a run that (with a little imagination) created a GPS track in the form of a cinnamon roll. Looking more closely, it sort of reminds a little of Duke…

I initiated my Fall 2023 Conference season with a short trip to Amsterdam to speak at Picnic Java Meetup. There were two talks on related topics. I did a talk on how to migrate from Spring Boot 2 to Spring Boot 3, focusing on the part Jakarta EE plays in that. The other talk was by Pieter Dirk Soels, and he gave an overview of Picnic’s experiences with the migration. Check out his write-up from the event. The slides from my talk are available on SpeakerDeck.

There were somewhere around 50-60 people who showed up for the event, despite the unsuspected summer temperatures heating up Amsterdam this early September evening. All in all a great turnout, and a great event with good questions and discussions with the attendees. And of course, (Dutch) fries with mayonnaise.

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.

All this for €40 ONLY!

(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.

With inspiration and training from Alina, I am becoming quite the Instagrammer. Check out the story from GOTO Amsterdam 2023.

My talk Modern and Lightweight Cloud Application Development with Jakarta EE 10 went well. I had a lot of demos and even added an extra demo right before the talk. Check out the slides on SpeakerDeck.

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.

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.

I had a packed room with standing room only for my talk titled Develop Modern and Lightweight Cloud Applications with Jakarta EE 10.

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.