Nov 11, 2015

My JavaOne Experience

Last week I had the opportunity to attend my second JavaOne conference. It was my first since 2009 and thus my first since Oracle took the reigns from Sun. It was also the first where I was invited as a “speaker”. The reason for the quotes around speaker is because the talk was actually a live podcast instead of a traditional talk. The podcast was given by myself and the rest of the OffHeap crew (http://www.javaoffheap.com/p/about-us.html), which consists of Freddy Guime (@fguime), Michael Minella (@michaelminella) and Bob Paulin (@bobpaulin). Josh Juneau (@javajuneau) is also a member of the team, but he unfortunately wasn’t able to join us.

For those of you unfamiliar with OffHeap, it’s a monthly podcast done by a team of local developers from Chicago that covers myriad topics in the Java and JVM space. For the JavaOne podcast, which we dedicated to Java’s 20th birthday, we discussed the relevance of Java today, we chatted about what’s on everyone’s tech radar, and we also paid tribute to the iconic Java Posse (http://www.javaposse.com/). We had a lot of fun doing it and we hope everyone has just as much fun listening to it. If you would like to listen to it, it can be found here.

Outside of doing the podcast, I was able to attend some really good sessions. Some of the more memorable ones included Dianne Marsh’s “How Netflix Thinks of DevOps”, Dierk Koenig’s “Frege: Purely Functional Programming for the JVM, and all four talks given by the incredible Venkat Subramaniam. The sessions were all great and I learned a lot, but to me the real value of attending a conference is what happens outside of the sessions. Being able to walk up to and talk with the leaders and game changers in the industry is invaluable. Fortunately the OffHeap guys I attended the conference with are well connected in the Java community, so they were able to introduce me to people like Charles Nutter (@headius), the Ruby guy, Simon Maple (@sjmaple), Developer Advocate for ZeroTurnaround and Java Champion, Ed Burns (@edburns), JSF spec team lead and Martijn Verburg (@karianna), jClarity CEO and co-leader of the London JUG, as well as countless others. Meeting them was definitely the highlight of my trip and something I won’t soon forget.

I’d like to thank Oracle for organizing such a great event and for letting the OffHeap crew do their podcast. It was a lot of fun and I hope everyone who attended had a good time as well. I’d also like to thank everyone who has been listening to us each month and invite those who haven’t been to give us a shot. We’re always open to topic suggestions so if there’s something you’d like us to talk about during a future podcast please let us know by tweeting us at @OffHeap. Thanks again Oracle. I already can’t wait to do this again next year.

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