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.