Kin of out of the blue, I was invited to speak at JCON WORLD ONLINE 2023. And not only a regular talk but the keynote of the EclipseStore Summit on the last day of the conference.

It was kind of a last-minute thing and I didn’t have time to create a brand new talk, so I revamped my Responsible Open Source talk to fit with the keynote format. You can check out the slides of Open Source – A Journey of Contribution and Collaboration here.

At the end of the keynote, I invited Markus Kett, the CEO of MictroStream on the stage (or in this case the screen) to talk about EclipseStore.

EclipseStore is a persistence layer for databaseless persistence, built for cloud-native microservices and serverless systems. It is a new project under the Eclipse Foundation. It has just released its first version, so go ahead and try it out. And, even better, take a look at the code in GitHub and start contributing.

Øredev is my local conference, and I can go by bike if the weather permits. But as everyone visiting Sweden in November knows, the weather is pretty volatile at this time of the year. This year, I did go by bike on Wednesday but had to resort to the bus on Friday morning.

Øredev has a mix of local and international speakers and is an extremely diverse conference when it comes to topics covered with Java as a prominent one.

I had two talks accepted to Øredev 2023, both scheduled on Friday. This made it possible for me to attend the conference on Wednesday, speak at J-Fall on Thursday, and be back for my talks on Friday.

The first talk was the migrating from Spring Boot 2 to Spring Boot 3 talk which has turned out to be my most accepted talk this year. It is a fun talk to do with live coding along with the slides.

Ten minutes later, I was on stage again for my second talk of the day. This talk titled How to Be a Responsible Open Source Citizen is a non-technical talk meant to inspire developers to engage themselves in Open Source. It also has some pointers on how to get started, and what to think of when starting an open source journey.

J-FALL is the biggest Java conference in the Netherlands. The 2023 edition was the 20th edition and had 1800 attendees registered. It is impressive for a one-day conference! The conference is organized by NLJUG (Nederlandse Java User Group) and is free for members of the JUG.

The venue for the conference is Pathé Ede, which is a cinema complex situated in Ede, about an hour’s train ride from Amsterdam. The speaker lineup was impressive, as always, covering a wide range of topics.

My talk was titled Prepare for Jakarta EE 11. As the title indicates, it is an overview of what’s coming in Jakarta EE 11. I also gave a demo of Jakarta Data, the newest addition to Jakarta EE.

In addition to my talk, the hallway track, and participation in the Foojay Podcast, I also met David and Ron who have written a book on how to migrate from an earlier version of Java EE/Jakarta EE to Jakarta EE 10. The book is called Cloud-Native Development and Migration to Jakarta EE and is available from a bookstore near you.

J-FALL is one of my favorite conferences, and this was my fourth consecutive time speaking there. It is such a great community around it. Hopefully, I will be back next year and many more years to come…

I have written a daily recap from each day of EclipseCon 2023, and here’s the summary of it all. Don’t worry, I will not repeat myself.

It all started with Community Day on Monday, followed by three intense days of the regular EclipseCon from Tuesday through Thursday. Read all about each day in my daily posts during the conference:

Community Day
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3

One of the aspects that make EclipseCon special to me is that it is an opportunity to meet and socialize with my Eclipse Foundation colleagues. Since we are a distributed organization, EclipseCon is one of the few opportunities during a year that we can meet face-to-face. While it is not the primary objective of the conference, it is a very good add-on.

Day 3 of EclipseCon 2023 was a bit quieter than the previous ones. I guess some of the attendees returned home early after a couple of intense conference days.

Emily and I hosted a panel session about MicroProfile and Jakarta EE. Since the two of us were the only panelists, it turned into a dialogue on stage. In my opinion, this format works much better than a normal panel session with a moderator and all that comes with it. After a short introduction about what to expect from the next releases of Jakarta EE and MicroProfile, we started by asking each other questions we had prepared in advance. That is, we prepared them without letting the other know what we were going to ask until we asked the question on stage. We also mixed in questions from the audience as we went.

My talk titled Prepare for Jakarta EE 11 was fairly well attended taking into consideration that it was scheduled in one of the last slots of the conference. I gave an overview of what to expect from all the updated specifications in Jakarta EE 11. A little extra attention was given to Jakarta Data since this is the only new specification in this release, and there is already a working implementation out there to use in a demo. Check out the slides from the talk on SpeakerDeck.

And, no EclipsCon day without the morning run. This time, Emily, Gesine, and I had a very pleasant run in almost summer-like temperatures, or at least that is how it felt since it was about 10 degrees warmer than the previous days.

We had the Jakarta EE Office Hours on the second day of EclipseCon 2023. The concept of office hours is to let attendees ask questions directly to the Eclipse Foundation staff involved in a particular area during scheduled slots. Since it is during sessions, it wasn’t exactly hectic. I had more conversations about Jakarta EE during the regular hallway track. But it is a great concept, so we will likely repeat it next year.

The Eclipse Foundation Architecture Council had a face-to-face meeting. The topic this year was the generation of SBOMs. An outcome of this discussion was that I have now created a pull request to add SBOM-generation in the parent pom.xml for all the Jakarta EE specifications and EE4J implementation projects. This means that the upcoming Jakarta EE 11 release will be delivering SBOMs for the released artifacts.,

In the evening, we had the Committer Recognition Reception, where the committers to the Eclipse Foundation projects were celebrated and could receive their committer gift. This year, it is a nice pocket knife. Luckily, there was an option to get it sent home by mail since knives and airport security usually don’t mix well…

Six early risers joined for the EclipseCon Community Run on the second day. We quickly split into two groups, hence two photos. It was a pretty cold morning, so the Jakarta EE branded buffs (neckwarmers) came in handy.

On the first day of EclipseCon 2023, Tanja and I had a three-hour Jakarta EE Workshop. Since this was the very first time we did this workshop, we were a little unsure of it would go. It turned out to go very well, even if the material was a little too extensive. Most participants were able to complete about half of the tasks during the three hours. But since it is a self-paced workshop, they will be able to complete it at any time later.

The rest of the conference day was mostly filled by the hallway track for my part. It is the best way to engage with new and old friends in the community.

#runWithJakartaEE is everywhere, and at EclipseCon there is an opportunity to run every morning. The informal Emily challenge is to join the run every day of the conference. Usually, Emily is the only one able to complete the challenge and wins it every year. Hence the name.
On day two of EclipseCon 2023, Emily and I were joined by Gesine and Gaël.

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…