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:

• Alex Soto
• Bartosz Majsak
• Oleg Šelajev
• Adrian Nowak
• Adam Dudczak
• Andres Almiray
• Peter Kofler
• Daniel Bryant
• Lukas Eder
• Josh Long

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!