Java Posse Roundup 2010 - Summary

I am sitting in the plane right now returning back to Atlanta from Denver, Colorado. It has been an incredible week. As you may have seen my Twitter tweets, I spent last week at the Java Posse Roundup in Crested Butte, Colorado. It was simply amazing. Some of the brightest minds in our industry were there and the conference setting was very cozy with around 40 attendees. It was a very diverse crowd with attendees from all parts of the US (incl. 4 people from Atlanta and 1 from Nashville) as well as quite a few folks from Europe (UK, Denmark, Norway) as well as Israel.

James Ward was there (Flex Evangelist for Adobe), Bruce Eckel (Author of "Thinking in Java"), ???? Joe Darcy (Lead at Oracle for Project “Coin” [JDK7]), Bill Pugh (Findbugs) and many more.

Here are the sessions I attended at the Roundup:

Tuesday

• NoSQL Databases
• Apple and HTML 5 versus Flash (What Does the Future hold) and UI Framework experiences GWT vs Flex vs ? 

Wednesday

• Measurable ≠ Meaningful (Business)
• Architecture standardisation
• JavaFX - What else do we want?

Thursday

• Alternative Views of SW Development (Convention over configuration, static vs. dynamic, Rockstar dependencies)
• When companies transition from awesome to sucky corporate environments
• Project Coin, JDK7, Language Evolution

Friday

• Source Control Systems (Server based (SVN) vs. Distributed VCS (Git, Mercurial)
• When the wheels come off agile
• Share your IDE/Editor tips and tricks

On Tuesday and Wednesday, there were Lightning Talks. Every attendee could sign up for 5 minute mini-presentations on any topic (technical, personal, informational you name it). This was really cool. Did you ever attend an IT conference where you could see fire eating? Bill Pugh did it!!!

On Thursday, I did a lightning talk on YSlow and JAWR which I think went pretty well (considering that I only prepared for it 1 hour in the afternoon that same day).
Thursday night, the 300th episode of the JavaPosse was recorded. It has been a lot of fun. The podcast episode was released on Friday!

This was my first JavaPosse Roundup conference. I am sure that I will return next year. It was an incredible learning experience and a ton of fun! A massive THANK YOU to Dick Wall, Tor Norbye, Carl Quinn, Joe Nuxoll and Bruce Eckel for organizing this amazing experience!

DevNexus Day One

Alright, this is just a super quick update on day one of our DevNexus conference. Day 1 went very smoothly with no major hick-ups. We have around 340 attendees (Incl. sponsors, speakers etc.), which constitutes a 40% growth compared to last year!!! Thanks to all that attended!

I attended the following sessions:

1. "Better Software with Java and Flex" (James Ward)
2. "Next Generation Development Infrastructure: Maven, M2Eclipse, Nexus & Hudson" (Jason van Zyl)
3. "Google App Engine: Cloud vs Cluster" (Toby Reyelts)
4. "The 90-Day Startup with Google AppEngine: A Case Study" (David Chandler)
5. "Effective Java" (Venkat Subramaniam)
6. "Smithing in the 21st Century" (Neal Ford)

The day finished off with a cocktail hour and I met some nice folks from The Home Depot and I spent the rest of the eventing chatting with the hard core of the crowd which involved mostly speakers such as Toby Reyelts, Charlie Collins, Barry Hawkins, James Ward, Pratik Patel and Greg Luck. After dropping Greg off at his hotel, I finally made it home right around midnight.

This has been a very good day. Time to get some sleep. See you all tomorrow at day 2!

DevNexus has its own Android App

Pretty cool - Charlie Collins created the first Android phone app for the DevNexus conference. Check it out at: http://code.google.com/p/and-conference/. Thanks Charlie!

Also, in case you haven't registered for DevNexus, yet. Please sign-up because registration is closing March 3rd.