Conferences

GeeCON 2022

This was my first time speaking at GeeCON. It is a yearly three-day conference in Kraków, Poland, with around 700 participants. This was the 12th edition of the conference. There were three parallel tracks. My talk titled Jakarta EE 10 is Coming YOUR Way, was on the second day of the conference.

Even after 15+ years of performing live demos on stage, it still baffles me when a demo that was not supposed to work, works perfectly fine when run on the big screen… And since GeeCON is in a cinema complex, the screens are really huge.

In the morning before my talk, Otavio and I had a lovely morning run before breakfast along the Vistula river. If you look closely at the picture, you can see the pig floating on the river behind us. Explanations of what it symbolizes differ, just google “Weird Poland” and see if you can figure it out…

Jfokus 2022

That was Jfokus 2022. As usual, an excellent conference hosted by Mattias and his team!

My talk titled Get Ready for Jakarta EE 10 went well. A couple of hours before the talk, I added a brand new demo of the Java SE Bootstrap feature of Jakarta RESTful Web Services 3.1.

I also did the Jakarta EE 8 to Jakarta EE 9.1 migration demo and decided on stage to take it all the way to Jakarta EE 10 instead. Some unexpected hiccups and surprises with the milestone build of GlassFish I was using, but that is sort of expected of a live demo…

Thanks, Mohammed for the picture and tweet of me on stage during the demo!

On Wednesday morning, we had the first annual Jfokus morning run. I brought Jakarta EE shirts to all attendees as you can see from the picture below. Next Jfokus will probably be at the usual time in February, so I guess I will have to bring something a little warmer than t-shirts then…

Umedev 2022

Umedev is one-day a developer conference for and by the local developer community and IT industry in Umeå. It is completely free for attendees This year’s edition featured three parallel tracks, so there were lots of great content to choose from. Most speakers were local with a couple of exceptions, myself included.

I presented Jakarta EE 10 is Coming Your Way after the lunch break. The presentation contained an overview of what’s coming in Jakarta EE 10 as well as a live demo of converting from older versions to Jakarta EE 9 and above.

It is great to be out talking to developers at these regional events. It is a way of expanding the bubble with influence from developer communities I’m not regularly a part of.

JavaLand 2022

JavaLand 2022 is a wrap! This is one of my absolute favorites when it comes to conferences, and this year finally back to in-person after being online the last two years. A bit smaller than usual, but with 100% community spirit!

This year, I had two Jakarta EE talks included in the agenda.

Both the talks were located in the Arena de Fiesta, where the stage is made up of ice(!). There was a thin carpet laid out on the ice under the speaker stand, but I can assure you that it was pretty cold at the end of the talk. Didn’t actually help that the M1 processor doesn’t provide any excess heat during the demo either. Almost made me miss my old Mac…

In addition to these two talks, we also set up a Jakarta EE Panel Discussion to fill an empty slot. The panel was made up of Emily Jiang, Christian Kaltepoth, Rudy De Busscher, Werner Keil, and Jan Westerkamp in addition to yours truly.

The JavaLand organizers were kind enough to give Eclipse Foundation a free booth in the Exhibition Hall where we featured Adoptium and Jakarta EE.

The Jakarta EE Developer Survey 2022 is open, and waiting for YOUR input!

CodeMash 2022

CodeMash is a conference I always enjoy very much coming back to, so I was extremely pleased when they decided to have a conference this year despite all that is going on. It really shows that it is possible to arrange in-person events in a safe way.

If I should describe CodeMash in one word, it would be Friendly. It is an extremely good vibe at the conference. It does, of course, help that it is held in the conference center of an indoor water park. The organizers are 100% transparent regarding the organization, budget, and everything else.

CodeMash offers a mentoring program for new speakers. When you get a talk is accepted, you get the question of whether you would consider mentoring a new speaker or be mentored by an experienced one. Since I consider myself pretty experienced as a speaker, I signed up as a mentor this year as well.

I think mentoring programs like this one is an excellent idea and would encourage anyone offered to participate in one to do so!

My talk, Jakarta EE 10 is Coming Your Way! was scheduled for the last day of the conference. Actually to the last time slot before the conference closing session. Usually, I prefer to be scheduled earlier in the program, but I guess that’s how every speaker feels. At CodeMash they have a closing session with a raffle, so there is another incentive for the attendees to stick around rather than beat the traffic on Friday afternoon.

To sum up, CodeMash was an excellent start to the 2022 conference year and I hope to be back next year! I also look forward to speaking at lots of conferences in the upcoming months and meeting up with community members in the conferences-within-the-conference happening at meals, parties, and hallways between and after sessions.

JakartaOne Livestream 2021 CFP is OPEN!

JakartaOne Livestream is a one-day virtual conference that focuses on Cloud Native Java, MicroProfile, and Jakarta EE. The Call for Paper is open from July 15 to September 15. But don’t wait, submit your abstract NOW for a chance to speak at an event attended by more than 1000 participants. Check out the previous events for inspiration:

– JakartaOne Livestream 2019
– JakartaOne Livestream 2020

Reflect, Relax, Recharge at Devnexus 2020

The next conference I will be attending is Devnexus in Atlanta which is organized by the Atlanta Java User Group.

This year, Devnexus is extended with a JUG Leader Summit scheduled the day before the conference where there will be more than 40 Java User Groups represented.

In my session, What’s going on with Jakarta EE, I will provide an update about the ongoing work with Jakarta EE 9. This talk is also an opportunity to come forward and have a dialogue about everything going on in and around the Jakarta EE Working Group at the Eclipse Foundation.

During the conference, you will probably find me around the Jakarta EE booth with Tanja when I am not attending talks by all the amazing speakers. Please visit ut there for an informal chat about open source or to pick up some of our Jakarta EE swag!

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 CodeOne 2019

I am on my way back home from this year’s Oracle CodeOne. As always, this week is so filled with content and activities that it just flies by.

In previous years, I have always had the sort of empty feeling on Thursday (the last day of the conference); the exhibition hall and Groundbreakers Hub is packed away, lunch in the hallways, lots of people walking around with luggage just catching a couple of sessions before heading home.

This year was different. As Ed Burns said in the talk he held together with Phillip Krüger that he found Thursday to be the best day of the conference, to be able to just attend sessions without all the other distractions. And I agree! This year, I listened to great talks from 9 in the morning until 15 in the afternoon with only 15 min breaks between the sessions. No distractions, other than the usual short hallway discussions between the sessions.

and

Jakarta EE 8 was launched the week before CodeOne. Another important milestone for the community! We had a lot of great talks, BOFs and hallway discussions.

The general impression of this edition of CodeOne is that it was smaller than last year. Both in the number of attendees, but also the number of exhibitors. The community spirit, however, was as strong as always!