For some time, I had a wish that I could organize a Java conference in Portugal. Well, that finally happened in 19th June 2018, with the first edition ever of JNation, which is also the first Java Conference in Portugal.
I was already talking about doing the conference a couple of years ago, but only this year it was possible.
The Beginning
I think the entire idea started when I went to my first now defunct JavaOne conference. If I recall correctly, it was the year of 2012. I’ve never been to a conference before and I felt overwhelmed by the size and organization behind it.
Another thing that impressed me was the community around it. Everyone was so kind and eager to help. It really motivated me to also join the community and try to help other developers.
In Portugal, the Java community was not particularly strong. So, I was not even sure that there was a demand for a Java conference in Portugal. A strong community had to be built first. The PT.JUG was the only JUG available in Portugal, but most of their sessions required me to travel for 4 hours to attend the sessions. To build the community, we also required more local JUG’s.
To that end, I’ve created the Coimbra JUG. Slowly another community was being built. Shortly after, two other JUGs were created in Portugal: Beira JUG and Porto JUG.
The Coimbra JUG
Since its inception in late 2013, the Coimbra JUG grew to more than 400 members. During this time, it organized more than 20 meetups with international speakers from companies like Oracle, Redhat, Hazelcast or Zeroturnaround. Overall, these meetups gathered more than 700 attendees from all over the country.
It became clear that there was a demand for content, a place where developers could meet other developers and learn with each other. The conference dream could become a reality.
alphaCoimbra
alphaCoimbra is a local non profit organization, created by local entrepreneurs with the intent to implement activities aiming to make Coimbra one of the most innovative and vibrant medium-size cities in Europe.
They were also looking to organize a technology conference in Coimbra, not necessarily about Java. Still, both the Coimbra JUG and alphaCoimbra started to work together to make this a reality.
JNation Conference
And the rest is history!
Well, it was not that simple. We were able to gather a great team that worked hard to make this happen.
Our initial idea was to make something simple. One day, a single track for 200 developers. Things quickly escalated in a positive way. The response was massive! We quickly sold out the first 200 seats, and speakers were contacting us to come. We had to increase the event capacity several times until we reached 450 developers and we added a second track to accommodate more sessions and speakers.
We sold out! And we had plenty of other developers in a waiting list to join. Unfortunately, we had to make the hard decision to cap the conference size. The venue was not the issue. We just had to completely rethink the entire event if we wanted to increase the capacity even more, so we preferred to go on a safer route.
In the end, we came up with the following numbers:
450+ attendees (yes a few sneaked in above the 450 limit)
14 speakers
30 volunteers
2 tracks
14 sessions
20 sponsors
13 supporters
We cannot be more proud and happy for a first run. On the other hand, this really sets the bar very high for future editions, so we hope we can keep going and make this event a success.
Check out the Opening Keynote video:
All the sessions were recorded and are available for free on JNation Youtube channel.
A HUGE Thank you to everyone that got involved in the conference: attendees, sponsors, speakers, volunteers, partners and of course the team! Cya next year!
The Fifteen Meeting of Coimbra JUG was about Application Servers. For a long time, developers complain about Application Servers. Developers find them heavyweight and the current trend is to develop lightweight, isolated and contained services. Most call this approach Microservices. In my opinion, there is not a 100% accepted definition of what a Microservice is, but this is another story. Anyway, are Application Servers prepared to answer the new demands? António Gonçalves has the answer in is new session. Have a look and decide for yourself:
Just Enough App Server
Are Websphere or Weblogic appropriate for your project? Too big” ? Do Jetty or Tomcat actually meet your needs? Too “small”?
Neither too big nor too small. What you need is “just enough app server” to support only the subset of APIs and services your application needs.
In this session I will make an inventory of Java EE application servers (Weblogic, Websphere, JBoss, GlassFish), Profile Web (Tomee, Payara, Siwpass) and Servlets (Tomcat, Jetty, Undertow). If Microservices is want you want, I will introduce other modular solutions such as WildFly Swarm, KumuluzEE, Spring Boot or Dropwizard. I will talk about performance, war, executable jar, monitoring, management, optimization, use cases and some personal feedback… all this by showing code and executing several types of applications (from the simplest to more complex) in several kinds of containers … and maybe even on a Raspberry Pi.
In the end, we would like to thank Praxis and KWAN for sponsoring the event with the venue, food and drinks for everyone! Remember to check out KWAN Calculadora Salarial.
Thank you very much for your support! And of course, the awesome number of attendees that participated in the event.
The Thirteen Meeting of Coimbra JUG was about Databases and how to keep their Schema versioning and controlled. While not being directly related to Java, it’s very common for every Java developer to come across with a project that needs to use a Database. Usually developers worry about versioning the code, but nobody cares about the Database. Shouldn’t the database be treated the same was as the code, since it’s also a part of the application? For that reason, we think this is a good topic to have on our JUG.
To talk about this very challenging topic, we had the pleasure to host Nuno Alves. Nuno is a very experience DBA, with more than 10 years of experience with Oracle, PostgreSQL, MSSQLServer and DB2. He is the right man to have on your team to deal with the Database stuff!
The session itself covered ER modelling, versioning of SQL scripts, deployment and documentation. It also had a demo of a tool called Flyway to version and control scripts executions in different environments.
In the end, we would like to thank Praxis and Critical Software for sponsoring the event with the venue, food and drinks for everyone! Thank you very much for your support!
This December, the Coimbra JUG had it’s second birthday! To celebrate, we had two awesome meetings with well known international speakers: Heather VanCura and Christoph Engelbert. The attendance was great. We had around 40 persons on each event. Thank you to all attendees that showed up and even brought friends!
Participate in the Future of Java
The first event, held at Cervejaria Praxis Coimbra (a local brewery store), Heather spoke about the Future of Java and how individuals or corporations could participate in the JCP by providing a set of step-by-step instructions. We also discussed about the Adopt OpenJDK and Adopt-a-JSR programs. I was able to talk a little bit about my experience with the Adopt-a-JSR, but for Adopt OpenJDK I had to rely on my good friend Ivan Ivanov to talk about his experience in the Bulgarian JUG and Adopt OpenJDK.
The second event, was also held at Cervejaria Praxis Coimbra. We had the pleasure to listen Christoph Engelbert talk about Hazelcast and Distributed Computing. Chris showed us ways to partition and parallelize the processing and analyzing of data with Hazelcast.
Last Wednesday, 4 November 2015, the tenth meeting of Coimbra JUG was held at the Department of Informatics Engineering of the University of Coimbra, in Portugal. The attendance was great. We had around 40 persons and a lot of them were on a Coimbra JUG meeting for the first time. We had the pleasure to listen Sérgio Ferreira talk about Maven. Sérgio is an old time member of Coimbra JUG and he volunteered to present the session for us for the first time. A big thanks to Sérgio! It’s not easy to do it.
Love it or hate it (and a lot of people seem to hate it), Maven is a widely used tool by 64% of Java developers (source – Java Tools and Technologies Landscape for 2014). Most experienced developers already got their share of Maven headaches. Usually in the hard way, banging with their head into a brick wall. Unfortunately, I feel that new developers are going through the same hard learning process. In a young JUG as ours, it makes perfect sense to have a dedicated session to Maven, since sooner or later everyone will have to use Maven.
As always, we had surprises for the attendees. IntelliJ sponsored our event, by offering a free license to raffle among the attendees. Congratulations to A. Ventura and Ana Filipa for winning the license. Develop with pleasure! We also handed a few Tomitribe and ZeroTurnaround t-shirts.
Also, we already have our 11th and 12th Meetings scheduled for 2 and 9 of December of 2015. These are going to celebrate our 2nd Anniversary and we are happy to have two international well know speakers: Heather VanCura and Christoph Engelbert. Please, check our Meetup website for more information.
