Two weeks ago I had an extremely busy week: speaking at three conferences in three different countries in four days — JCON (Cologne, Germany), Devoxx France (Paris) and Devoxx Greece (Athens). We had the opportunity to give our talk “Learning modern Java the playful way” three times! It was well worth it, as I got to see so many people and our talk was well received everywhere.
JCON Europe
On Monday, I took the train to Cologne.
Java Luminaries Summit
In the afternoon, there was a Java Luminaries Summit @ JCON Europe, where folks active in the Java community discuss topics relevant to the language and ecosystem. This includes Java Champions, JUG leaders, speakers and other active members from the community, like Sharat Chander, Ana-Maria Mihalceanu, Andres Almiray, Brian Vermeer, Cay Horstmann, Kevin Wittek, Kevin Dubois and many more. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the whole summit, as I had some work to do first.
After the summit, there was a pizza session, which was a great opportunity to socialize with other speakers, like Tim te Beek and Rick Ossendrijver, and community members. Also, I got to see my colleague Marcin Mycek and introduce him to some people.
JCON conference day 1
On Tuesday morning, we first prepared our session. Even though we have done this talk before, we always update it to the latest Java version and make small tweaks to continuously improve it.
For lunch, I met with Annelore Egger, François Martin and two of his colleagues.
Before the conference, we also had the opportunity to sign up for interviews with Baruch Sodogursky which were livestreamed on YouTube.
During his interview, Piotr Przybył talked about our talk:
Baruch and I had a lovely conversation about reading code in the age of AI:
This is a topic dear to my heart, as I have been talking about Reading Code for a while — and I still think it’s important no matter who has “written” the code.
In the afternoon it was time for our first talk of the week.
Giving this talk is a lot of fun. It was very nice to have people come up to us afterwards to tell us how much they liked it. (Special thanks to JavaCro organiser Branko Mihaljević for all your kind words!)
Fortunately, I also had some time to catch up with more people, like Sandra Parsick, Sandra Ahlgrimm, and several others.
JCON speaker dinner
In the evening, it was time for the speaker dinner.
Earlier during the day, I had run into my friend Rien Korstanje, who I hadn’t seen in a while. We know each other from when I used to contribute to cucumber-jvm, as he is one of the core maintainers. Turns out is now also a maintainer for JUnit, so we had some time to catch up during dinner with Marc Philipp and Christian Stein (thanks for laughing at all my silly jokes!).
Unfortunately there was not enough time to properly catch up with everyone.
Devoxx France
On Wednesday, it was time to travel to Paris. We took the train and through sheer luck ended up with seats next to each other, even though we had booked through our respective employers. This gave us time to reflect on how the talk went at JCON and prepare for our session at Devoxx France in the afternoon.
After surviving the Paris metro, the first person we saw at Devoxx France was Estelle Landry, which was a very happy reunion as I hadn’t seen her since Devoxx Morocco.
Estelle helped us get some lunch, pointed us to the speaker room and got us settled in so we were ready for our session. We also ran into Daniel Garnier-Moiroux in the speaker room.
Our talk was again in the afternoon, and the audience was amazing! This was quite possibly the most engaged audience we have had for this talk, and also the best version of the talk we have done so far.
It seems we were not the only ones who thought so, because we also received the highest rating for our talk so far: 4.92/5. In addion, we received some very nice feedback like “You make an awesome team” and “Very funny”.
Unfortunately, the video is not available yet, but it should be added to the Devoxx France YouTube channel soon. And photos will be added to the Devoxx France Flickr albums.
In the evening, it was again time for the speaker dinner, where I had the opportunity to catch up with people like José Paumard, Zineb Bendhiba, and several others… We didn’t stay too late, as we had an early start to travel to Athens the next day.
Devoxx Greece
We met up early in the morning to take the train to the airport and fly to Athens. Upon arrival, we took a taxi to the venue to figure out the logistics for our talk the next day.
In the evening, there was a speaker reception where we got to meet some of the other speakers, including Viktor Gamov, Alina Yurenko, Alexander Chatzizacharias, Holly Cummins and Patrick Baumgartner. An added bonus for me was the opportunity to catch up with my colleague Michelle Frost, who I don’t get to see that often.
The next morning we met up at the venue for our talk. It was once again time to put on a labcoat 😉
We were a little rushed, as the talk slots were slightly shorter. But it seems that our talk was again well received; we received nice ratings (4,78/5) and lovely feedback. Special thanks to the person who came up to talk to me in Dutch and the folks who came up to us when we were taking pictures to tell us that ours was their favorite session!
We did a short interview for Devoxx Greece and recorded a short video ourselves with the help of Alina Yurenko (thanks!).
In the afternoon, I had some time to catch up with people, had to take a meeting (is it even remote work if you don’t work from various weird places like conferences, trains, airports and hotel lobbies?) and then it was time to head home.
A great week
Overall, I had a great week. It was wonderful to see so many friends and meet new people. Many thanks to the conference organisers, volunteers and attendees at JCON, Devoxx France and Devoxx Greece and of course my amazing cospeaker Piotr Przybył.