JavaOne: The Summary
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| Taylor Street Cafe |
Maybe it's because since I first spoke at JavaOne last year I've met a lot of people in this ecosystem - Oracle Java people, other conference organisers, Java User Group leaders, speakers and attendees from all sorts of places - and seeing many of them in one place is fun and makes you feel like you're "home". I'd be sat in the Taylor St Cafe area and people would sit down and hang out with me. I'd be hiding somewhere trying to write a presentation and people would say Hi. I'd be separated from the other LJC guys while I grabbed a glass of water and someone would stop to chat. It was awesome. I even managed to get a tiny bit of work done between socialising.
Personally, I have learnt very valuable lessons:
- Doing two conferences back to back is exhausting. If I do it ever again, I really need to optimise my travel between them (i.e. not fly from St Louis to London and then to San Francisco 48 hours later).
- Especially if I have two conferences back to back, but almost definitely as a rule, it's best to have the materials for presentations complete before the conference. I probably would have enjoyed myself even more, and definitely had a chance to see a lot more sessions, if I hadn't had one presentation to finish.
- Presenting four sessions in one conference is extremely challenging. Technically I only had two full-length presentations (the Disruptor presentation I've done at OSCON/GOTO/QCon etc and my Technical Approach to Women, which was more like a very structured BOF), a short 20-minute talk and a panel. But I think one full-length presentation and a couple of other bits is probably a much more sane amount. Especially given 1) and 2) above.
There will be a bunch of other blog posts mentioning the inconvenience of having it in three hotels, the poor suitability of some of the rooms, the difficulty of sharing San Francisco with Oracle Open World, the mediocre food. But you don't spend the money to fly halfway across the world to San Francisco for the crappy box lunches. You fly here to meet - face-to-face - some of the people who created Java, those who are steering it now, and the community that continues to make it relevant and fun.
Highlights for me:
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| James Gosling talks about Robots! |
- Technical keynote
- Dr Robert Ballard's keynote
- Community keynote
- James Gosling on stage!
- Having well-known Java people say Hi to me out of the blue
- My Women in Technology session
I already mentioned the technical keynote in my summary of Sunday,
but I forgot to talk about Dr Robert Ballard's section, which is crazy
because it was so inspiring. What I got out of that was how much fun
technology can be, and how kids are really ready to be amazed and
engaged with science and technology, provided you get them young enough.
I also really loved that the photos of all the scientists showed great
diversity, something he seems to take very seriously. His comment was
"A child needs to see their face 20 years out to know they can play in
the game. Don't sell science, sell scientists and engineers". The point
I took from that was that by focussing on "science" and "technology",
we could be losing people - by showcasing the people, the talent, the
passions, we are much more likely to engage children. And I think that
stands for adults as well.
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| A robot! |
And this nicely fits the message I was trying to get across in my session on Wednesday (which I know I've already blogged about)
- it's dead important to address the failure points when it comes to
diversity, but I think we forget to push the positives - the reason we
don't understand why some groups of people are under-represented in
technology is because we all love being here, it's a great industry to
work in. I'd love to see our passions more widely showcased than simply
at conferences where we're a self-selecting audience.
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| The LJC panel about our involvement in the Java Community Process |
Not only was this a great JavaOne for me personally, it was a real triumph for the London Java Community.
Last year there were only two of us here, and Martijn was working hard
to introduce me to the other JUG leaders and the people on the JCP
committee that we were going to be working with over the next 12
months. This year, there were five of us here, spreading the word about
our work as a member of the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process (the Java standards body), primarily our Adopt a JSR program. We also wanted to talk to a load of people about the Adopt OpenJDK
program as well, we've found lots of developers are really keen to
develop the language itself, Java at the fundamental level, and we
really want to help bridge the gap between the guys who work on the OpenJDK
project and the developers in the community. But all our hard work
over the last year, kicking off these programs and working with other
user groups and Oracle to really harness the power of the community, has
been recognised. We've won not one, but two awards - woohoo! Fame,
glory, girls/boys, money etc await us! Well, not quite... but it's
certainly nice to be the "Award Winning London Java Community".
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| The LJC in the Community Keynote |
Our two shiny accolades are:
- Duke's Choice Award for Innovation and Contributions to the Community
- JCP Member of the Year with SouJava
So, a really great JavaOne. I'm not sure, if I'm honest, who reads my
summaries of conferences - I know lots of people do read them, but I
don't know if that's those who went to the conference or those who would
have liked to have gone, or those who don't know what it's like at
conferences.
But in case this is useful to anyone who is reading this, next year come to JavaOne if:
- You want to know what's coming up for Java the platform or Java the language
- You want to meet, or at least see presenting, the people who are actually making these changes
- You want to meet other Java developers from around the world - whether you want to find someone with the same problems as you, or want to see different issues that face people.
- You want to see the Power Of User Groups!
- You want to understand how decisions are made with regards to the future of Java
- You want to meet like-minded people
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| The Exhibitors Hall was like Vegas! But there was a buzz which was infectious |
Oh there's millions more, and even if you only tick one of those
reasons, I personally think it's a great way to get a better
understanding of the language we use every day as developers.
And finally, some of my sessions will be available, audio and slides only, via the content catalog. Look for the following:
- UGF10467 - Benefits of Open Source
- CON3732 - Concurrent Programming with the Disruptor
- CON5130 - London Java Community: How to Change the World
- CON11338 - The Problem with Women: A Technical Approach
Java (programming language)
Published at DZone with permission of Trisha Gee, DZone MVB. See the original article here.
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