Last Thursday, 22 May 2014, the fourth meeting of Coimbra JUG was held on the Department of Informatics Engineering of the University of Coimbra, in Portugal. The attendance was very good, we had around 30 people to listen Paulo Martins talk about the Web Framework – Google Web Toolkit. A very special thanks to Paulo for taking the challenge and steer the session.
I did a quick introduction to the group to welcome the newcomers and Paulo dived right in the session about Google Web Toolkit. GWT is not exactly a new technology, but I think that the topic draws some interest since I know a lot of people using it in their projects, and looking into Rebellabs – Java Tools and Technologies Landscape for 2014, GWT appears at 4th place for the Web Frameworks in use with a 10% share. Only a few people in the audience used GWT before, but there was a lot of interest to learn a little about it. Paulo presented some of the most relevant topics about GWT and show cased a few examples with live code demos.
For this meeting, Paulo had a surprise for the attendees: beer and chocolates. Thanks for Praxis Brewery for proving the beer! IntelliJ also sponsored our event, by offering a free license to raffle among the attendees. Congratulations to Bruno Martins for winning the license. Develop with pleasure!
Here are the materials for the session:
Enjoy!
During last week, the 6th edition of GeeCon took place in Kraków – Poland between 14 and 16 May of 2014. This was the first time that I have submitted proposals for speaking sessions and I was lucky enough to be accepted in one of my submissions! More about that later. Unfortunately, I only attended half of the conference, since I couldn’t join for day 1 and for the morning of day 2 which may turn this report a little inaccurate. Anyway here are my thoughts on some aspects of Geecon:
Venue
The Venue is a Movie Theatre with several rooms where all the sessions are held. This style of venue is awesome, since speakers have a big screen and attendees are confortably seated with a perfect view to the screen and the presenter. On a down side, the common halls and the corridors were small for so many people and the sponsors booths.
Sessions
As I said before, Geecon gave me the chance to speak for the first time outside Portugal, so a big thanks for the organisation for picking up one of my sessions. I had a lightning session (15 minutes), named “Five ways to Not Suck at Being a Java Freelancer”, based on my article with the same name that I wrote a couple of months ago. This was by far the best session of the conference (just kidding)! Anyway, I had a good attendance, probably half of the room. I was a little bit nervous, but after I started all of that went away and I think I was able to deliver a good presentation. Attendees seemed to be really into it, and a lot of question were asked at the end. The feedback that I had was overwhelming! A cool thing is that the session was taped, so I will be able to review it and share it when it’s released. For the moment, only the slides are available.
Since I have missed the first half of the conference, I’m unable to comment on any session scheduled during that period, but I was able to attend a very good session by Sandro Mancuso about Crafted Design and how to organize the code in a different way. I recommend to check it out.
Community
The community was great! It was awesome to hang out with some familiar faces from the past, but also to hang out with new friends. A special thanks again for the Geecon organisation, specially to Adrian Nowak for taking me and a few other guys to a city tour around Kraków.
In no particular order, a special thanks for the following people that made my conference well worth it:
And many others…
Final words
This was my first time at Geecon and I would definitely like to return next year. I’m not sure if that is possible, since there are so many conference during the year that I would like to attend and is not possible for me to go for all of them. Anyway, I recommend to try Geecon!