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!
I had the opportunity to attend last Devoxx in Belgium. It was my first time attending a Devoxx conference and it was an awesome conference. During the event, I joined an Hackergarten organised by Arun Gupta and had the chance to contribute tests for a suit of Java EE 7 Samples in Github. Since I’m very interested in Batch processing, I started to write a few tests for the JSR-352 samples and very quickly we found a possible bug in the specification.
So, Arun Gupta told me how could I report the bug and check all the information related with the JSR-352 and told me about the JCP and the Adopt a JSR processes. The bug that we found was already reported and you can check it here.
I later met Heather VanCura that manages the JCP Program Office and she was very interested in the experience I just had at the Hackergarten. For that reason, I was interviewed to tell my own story and hopefully inspire other developers to contribute to the JCP or the Adopt a JSR processes. Here is the interview:
If you want to know more about the JCP and the Adopt a JSR processes, check:
I continue to contribute to the Java EE 7 Samples project and you are also invited to do so if you wish. I’ve found more bugs and this is my first report and contribution to the Java ecosystem.
During this week, more precisely between 25 and 26 of March the first edition of JavaLand came to life in a theme park called Phantasialand in Brühl – Germany. I only decided to go very close to the event, even after already discarded my presence. I’m glad that I was able to attend. Unfortunately for me, I was not able to enjoy the fullest of the first day due to a few bugs I had to solve in one of my work projects. Anyway here are my thoughts on some aspects of JavaLand:
Venue
I’m totally biased on the venue since I love theme parks! Thanks to the sponsors, we got to enjoy a few rides available in the park, like roller coasters, simulators and a few others, totally for free and no waiting lines! How cool is that? Take a look into Black Mamba. Phantasialand also have hotels where you can stay, so you got everything in one place. I actually choose to stay in an hotel outside the park to reduce costs, and it was good enough for me. Wi-fi was generally available and conference room sessions were good, you could see and hear the speaker properly.
The Community Hall was just amazing, lots of room, tables and chairs for you to hack, code, work or just hang out with your friends. The organization hit pure gold with the venue choice.
Sessions
Most of the sessions were in German. No surprise here, since the conference was held in Germany. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to speak German but for every schedule you had at least one english session. As I said before, I couldn’t attend many sessions on day 1, but the program seemed interesting enough. Day 2 had better content in my opinion. These are my top 3 sessions:
I did not see any recording cameras around, but maybe the content will be available as an audio format. I’m not sure. Need to confirm.
Food
In the last few years I attended JavaOne and Devoxx, which are probably the top Java conferences around the world, but the food there totally sucked! JavaLand did it right! Awesome buffet, with several options during lunch, snack and dinner. They even have small chocolate cupcakes and I couldn’t stop eating them. By far the best food I had at a conference.
Community
The community was awesome! I have spent most of my time in the Community Hall, hanging out, networking and hacking with a lot of people. Several events were being held in the room, like the NightHacking Live Stream with Stephen Chin, the Java EE 7 Hackergarten with Arun Gupta or the Adopt OpenJDK supported by the London JUG. Thanks to Mani Sarkar I was able to checkout, change and build the JDK 8 and try the changes that I introduced myself to the JDK. Pretty awesome! I also won a brand new Raspberry PI courtesy of the DOAG e.V. SIG Java by answering a quiz correctly.
In no particular order, a special thanks for the following people that made my event memorable:
And many others…
Final words
JavaLand was well worth it. The general feeling was that the conference is established for many years, but was actually a first timer. The organisation completely nailed it every aspect and I’m definitely returning for a second event. A big thanks to the conference board: Fried Saacke, Markus Eisele, Tobias Frech, Alexander Neumann and the rest of the team for delivering this awesome event! Cya next year! #jatumba