JavaOne 2011 - Days 1 and 2 (Sunday/Monday)

Hi all,

So I'm at JavaOne and it's been an interesting first couple of days!  I'm live tweeting a number of live announcements and insights but I thought I'd try to round-up my experiences so far on Days 1 and 2.

Apologies for anyone/thing I've missed - it's been a whirlwind! 

Sunday


My Walk

I started the day with an interesting walk from my apartment to "The Zone".  First thing that struck me was the vast numbers of homeless people on the streets, really sad to see and not what I expected from San Fran at all.  They say that Britain is a broken society, I think I'm seeing worse here in San Fran.

JUG Leaders Brunch

The JUG Leaders and Java Champions brunch was the first thing up on Sunday morning.  It was fantastic to put names to faces (a bunch of us only knew each other from the mailing list) and of course to see familiar friendly faces including Stephen Chin, Bruno Souza, Fabiane Nardon, Kirk Pepperdine, Stephan Janssen and many more! Oracle gave us a briefing on what was going to be announced in the keynotes, one of the focuses being on Java FX 2.0. I'm still personally not sure whether it's going to be 'too little, too late' given the rise of HTML5, but then again I'm not heavily involved in the UI space.

User Group Sunday

The rest of Sunday was spent with the JUG leaders and other community members for a bunch of Open Conference style sessions.  It's always good to discuss the issues that we all commonly face, thanks to John Yeary for organising.

The Duke awards were presented that evening outside in the Mason Street tent/cafe area and LJC's Trisha Gee accepted a Duke innovation award for the Disruptor framework that her company (LMAX) has been working on.  The Zero Turnaround guys also picked up their well deserved award for JRebel.

The evening ended with us meeting up with Charles Nutter and some of the other JRuby crowd at the Glassfish party in the Thirsty Bear, it never hurts to get free beer! Was also nice to see Dan Hardiker and a certain Mr Gosling there.

Monday

The Good

1. Oracle's stance and genuine efforts with the community.

• The Duke awards on Sunday night
• The free coffee and beer
• Featuring non Oracle speakers on the JavaOne front page
• The technical content of the overall program being determined in conjunction with a community committee.
• Their community interviews
• And more!

Credit goes to all of the Oracle team behind this including Nichole Scott, Sharat Chandar, Mark Reinhold, Henrik Stahl, Adam Messinger, Mary-Lou, Tori Weildt, Dalibor, Donald and many more!

2. Parts of the Keynote were really good.  Mark Reinhold was very clear explaining Java 7 and 8, the Java FX 2.0 demo with the Kinect controlled Duke went down well and they involved the JRuby guys to explain invokedynamic and what it means for non-Java languages.

3. The Mason Street area and the hangout spaces in the hotels are pretty cool

4. Attendance was way up from last year, real buzz about the place, it's pretty clear that the Java platform is going through an upsurge, exciting to see.

5.  JCP matters again.  We had lots of people turning up to the JCP events, buoyed by the results of JSR-348 (step one in reforming the JCP) with lots of feedback and interactive Q&A.  Even the public EC meeting was packed out!  I was on the panel for a number of these events and was really happy with the amount of interest and feedback, especially considering they're effectively non-technical sessions.

6. Good talks on Lambda (Alex Buckley) and Jigsaw (Mark Reinhold) for Java 8 from experts who actually engaged the audience!

7. The O'Reilly cocktail party, was able to talk shop with fellow authors and catch up with friends from OSCON such as Laurel Ruma, Sarah Novotny and the rest of the O'Reilly crew.

The Indifferent

1. Oracle have tried their best with "The Zone", but the fact remains that running around the 3 hotels is still fairly difficult and trying to find certain rooms inside the hotels also leaves attendees missing out on their events.  I haven't put this into "The Bad" section as the sign posting and extra helpers made it bearable (just).

2. The speakers room was very small and has limited WiFi signal, Oracle, please talk to the OSCON folks on their set-up!

3. Getting my photo taken in an alleyway in the rain for a tech magazine - us developers don't usually make good models, as was proven today!

4. Some of the even rooms are still small and pokey and seem to be stuck in a basement level (Parc55 in particular)

The Bad

1.  The WiFi constantly drops in and out, ruining some presenters demos and causing immense frustration for attendees.  Lessons need to be learned from some of the European conferences such as Devoxx and FOSDEM.  Hoping this improves tomorrow.

2. The Intel part of the keynote.  Caused the entire keynote to be late (they rambled on), was boring (some pretty hokey bar/line graphs) and the its content was better suited to OOW as opposed to JavaOne.

Phew - busy days so far, looking forward to sleep :-)

Cheers,
Martijn

JavaOne schedule

Here is my JavaOne schedule:  I can't mimic the nice colouring that Steve On Java has, but hey :-).


Please note the JCP EC meeting is open and free for all to join (Sunday 15:45) - we need the voice of the community there, so come along!


I'll actually be speaking at:

• 30440 - Java User Groups and the JCP (Sunday 14:30)
• 23647 - JCP and the Developer Community (Monday 11:00)
• 23641 - Meet the Executive Committee Candidates (Monday 1900)
• 23645 - Lightning Talks: JSRs in Progress (Wednesday 0830)
• 25303 - The Diabolical Developer (Redux)  (Wednesday 1500)
• 25303 - The Diabolical Developer (Redux) - repeat!  (Wednesday 1630)
• 37780 - Java Community Keynote (Thursday 0845)

Let me know if you want to catch up!  I'll be fairly flexible about turning up to most sessions, the benefit of attending a conference like JavaOne is as much isn't catching up with friends an colleagues as much as anything else :-)

The Modern Java Developer

Hi all,

Here's a brief synopsis that a colleague of mine (Ben Evans) and I have been thinking about for sometime, and we're curious to hear your feedback if you think you'd like to hear about some of the themes within this synopsis at the 2nd LJC Unconference.

"The role of the Java developer is undergoing a period of immense change - challenges such as manycore processors, new approaches to concurrency and a wealth of new languages (including functional and dynamic) on the JVM are redefining the nature of Java projects. The core SE/EE APIs have been supplemented by a large and growing body of additional material and technologies which the developer must know.

Some of the upcoming new Java 7 features - including closures, invokedynamic and standardised dependency injection tackle some of these challenges.  But it's not just core language updates that matter anymore, there's also been a change in the modern Java project lifecycle with a host of common tools and practices a developer will now be expected to encounter (largely borrowed from the Agile world).  Lastly, there are new JVM languages which are gaining in popularity and which the developers may expect to encounter on future projects."

Do people agree with the synopsis above?  Are they finding their Java projects changing to a new model?

Feel free to debate as I believe we're definitely not there yet!

Exciting projects on the go!

Hi all,

This is another mainly Java/Technology related post, although it's more of an overview of what I'm up to.  This is as much to do with getting it sorted in my head as anything else but people have asked what I'm involved in, so here goes:

1.) Reviewing an upcoming book on the Hudson Build Server (a favourite build tool of mine).  I'm definitely behind on helping out on this one, I really need a few solid hours of quiet time to review the material produced to date.

2.) Reviewing an upcoming book on Java 6 certification.  I'm trying to learn as much about the book review process as possible before hopefully co-authoring my own, so that's my main motivation for this one.  I'm still on the fence about certification, I dislike most of it but if it encourages people to study then that's not all bad.

3.) Negotiating (along with a colleague) a book deal with a big tech book publisher, we're getting closer to some sort of a deal I think!  This is the big exciting one for me, I've always wanted to try an author part of book if not an entire one so I really hope we can make this happen.

4.) Moderating on the Javaranch, which is going through a bit of an SEO overhaul at the moment.  I'm also hopefully getting my wife ("a most excellent Graphic Designer" and that's definitely not just according to me) to help give it a facelift.

5.) Community leading two open source projects (PCGen and Ikasan EIP).  These I wish I could spend a few extra regular hours on a week.  PCGen was the project that lead me into Open Source in the first place and the community spirit is just freakin awesome.  No matter how many times I take sabbaticals away from it, I always miss it far too much and just have to go back :).

Ikasan is the new kid on the block that I'm trying to turn into a "successful open source project" as part of my day job.  It's got a great deal of potential, but I need to spend a good deal more time with the community in order to realise it.

6.) Co-organising the London Java Community and the London Graduate and Undergraduate Development Community which currently involves helping organise an Unconference for the LJC and an not yet announced talk for the GDC.

7.) Writing several talks for conferences (sssh it's a secret)

With several of items above, I work with some pretty amazing and motivated people and that's why I pretty much stay involved, it's just plain fun and rewarding to boot!

So there you have it, my tech related life in a nutshell :).

Cheers,

Martijn

As an aside, I spotted the statement "If you want something done, give it to a busy person" on the web a couple of days ago while I was lying in bed nursing a bout of the man flu (which my wife was ever so patient with).  I realised that it holds pretty darn true for all of psychotically busy friends and colleagues that I know, they always seem the most organised and on to it.

Tips on presenting at a conference

So I stumped up my £95 (+VAT) and decided to go to the Open Source and Finance eXchange. The day had some fairly interesting topics which unfortunately were (more often than not) ruined by poor presentations. This was particularly irritating as this was a paid conference and I expected a minimal level in the quality of speakers.

Of course the great value in going to a conference is always the interaction with the other attendees, but still it was a little disappointing.

So I thought I'd point out some tips for presenting at a conference:

1. Be passionate in your delivery, no-one and I mean no-one is going to care about what you are talking about when you deliver it in a dull monotone.
2. Don't let that screen saver/power saver cut out your presentation!
3. Slow Down - Often people are nervous when they present, which is only natural, but it means that they have a tendency to speak far too quickly.
4. Slow Down part 2 - If the language you are speaking in is not your first language, or if you know you have a strong accent, then again for the sake of clarity, slow down!
5. If you're going to have graphics in your presentation, make sure they are readable when they are projected on the screen.
6. Don't use complicated graphics, keep it simple! If in doubt get a Graphic Designer to take a look for you.
7. Don't just repeat what are on your slides, the audience has already read them and you're adding no value.

Thankfully towards the end of the conference we had some good speakers including probably the best presentation I've ever seen at a conference. If you ever get the chance to see Simon Wardley (from Canonical) speak, then do yourself a favour and go and see him. The podcast of his talk will arrive here soon.