Java One 2014 – Create the Future
I spent the last week in San Francisco to attend JavaOne 2014. This was my third time attending JavaOne, so I was already familiarized with the conference. Anyway, this year was different since I was going as a speaker for the first time.
Create the Future
“Create the Future” was the theme of JavaOne this year. The last few years have been very exciting for the Java community. After many years without evolution, we see now Java 8 with lambdas and streams, Java EE 7 with new specifications and simplifications)and a huge effort to unify and support Java for embeddable devices. Java 9 is already in the pipeline which promises modular Java (project Jigsaw). Java EE 8 is going to improve a lot of specifications and bring new ones like MVC, JSON-B and the much awaited JCache. Now it’s the time to contribute by Adopting a JSR.
During the last few years we heard a lot of voices claiming that Java is dead. Looking at what’s happening now, it doesn’t seem that way. The platform is evolving, a lot of new developers are joining the JVM ecosystem, and the conference was vibrating with energy. By the way, Java is turning 20 years in 2015. Let’s see what is going to happen in 20 years from now. Let’s hope that this blog is still around!
Keynote
The opening Keynote was a recap on what’s happening in the last few years. You can find all the videos here. Just a few notes:
- Coimbra JUG shows on the map of the new JUG’s:
- The technical Keynote was interrupted because of lack of time. This also happened to me in one of my sessions. I understand that there is a time frame, but this was not the best way to kick out the conference. I’m pretty sure that most attendees would prefer to shorten up the Strategy Keynote for the Technical one.
- I was referenced in the Community Keynote, because of my work at the Java EE 7 Hackergarten. Thank you Heather VanCura. Count me in with future contributions!
Venue
The event was split between the Moscone Center, The Hilton Hotel and the Parc 55 Hotel. I’m not from the time where JavaOne was completely held in the Moscone Center, so I can’t compare. Because of the layout of the hotels, you need to run sometimes from session to session and the corridors are not the best place to have groups of people chatting. A few of the rooms also have columns in the middle which makes difficult for the attendees and the speaker to be aware of everything.
In my session Development Horror Stories [BOF4223] I had to run with Simon Maple, to get there on time. The problem was that the previous slot sessions were held at the Hilton and then moved to the Moscone, which is a 15 minutes walk. By the way, no taxi wanted to take us because it was too close.
Food
Not even going to comment about it. Yeah the lunch sucked, and yeah I’m weird with the food.
Sessions
There is so much stuff going on, that it’s impossible to attend every session that you want to go. I probably only attended half of the sessions that I’ve signed up for. I had to split some of my time between the sessions, the Demogrounds, the Hackergarten and also a bit of personal time for the last details of my sessions. Not all sessions had video recording, but all of them should have audio and be available via Parleys.
These are my top 3 sessions (from the ones I have attended):
- Confessions of a Former Agile Methodologist [CON4767] by Stephen Chin
- Java EE Game Changers [CON6759] by David Blevins
- Java EE 8 Community Update and Panel [CON2131] by Panel of Java EE Vendors
My Sessions
I’m relatively happy with my performance delivering the sessions, but I can improve much more. I do have to say, that I didn’t feel any nervousness. I guess that I’m feeling more comfortable on public speaking, plus preparing everything with a few weeks in advance also helped. Moving forward!
Development Horror Stories [BOF4223]
with Simon Maple
We had around 150+ people signed up, but only 50 or so showed up. I think this was related to the switch venues problem I described earlier. At the same time there was also an Oracle Tech Party with food, drinks and music. I guess that didn’t help either.
Anyway, me and Simon kicked out the BOF with a few of our own stories where things went terribly wrong. The crowd was really into it, so our plan to ask people for the audience to share their own stories worked perfectly. We probably had around 10+ people stepping up the stage. In the end we had a Java 8 In Action book give away signed by the author, for the best story voted by the audience. The winning story belong to Jan when he wrote a few scripts to clear and insert data into a database for tests. Unfortunately he executed it in a production environment by accident!
I think people enjoyed the BOF and this can work in pretty much everywhere. I’ll submit it in the future to other conferences. BOF’s don’t really need slides, but we did some anyway:
Java EE 7 Batch Processing in the Real World [CON2818]
with Ivan Ivanov
This session was the first one of the day at 8.30 in the morning and was packed with people. It was surprising to see so many so early. Me and Ivan started the session with an introduction on Batch, origins, applications and so on. Next we went through the JSR-352 API to prepare for our demo at the end. The demo is based around World of Warcraft and we used the Batch API to download, process and extract metrics from the game Auction House’s (they are like eBay in the game). Stay tuned for a future post describing the entire sample.
Unfortunately we run out of time and we couldn’t show everything that we wanted, or at least go into more details about the demo. We allowed people to ask questions anytime, and we had a lot o them. I’m not complaining about it. I prefer doing it this way, since it makes the session more interactive. On the other hand, you end up using more time and is not very predictable. We will reorganize the session to perform the demo in the middle and everything should be fine like that.
And the check the session code here.
CON4255 – The 5 people in your organization that grow legacy code
I’m pretty happy with how this session go. Considering that it was the last day of the conference and also one of the last sessions of the day, I had probably around 80+ people. I’m also happy because it was video recorded, so I can check it properly later.
I’m not going to spoil the content, but I think the attendees really enjoyed the session and had many moments to laugh about the content. I’ll just leave you with the slides:
Final Words
The event was huge, so I’m probably writing another post about it, since I don’t want to write a very long boring post. Next one is going to focus a little more on other sessions, activities and community!
I would like to thank everyone that attended my sessions and send a few specials ones: to Reza Rahman for helping me in the submission process, to Heather VanCura for the Hackergarten invite and for my co-speakers Ivan Ivanov and Simon Maple. Thanks everyone!