Last month I had the honor of attending JCrete; “the hottest unconference on the planet!” I had heard many great things, and it certainly lived up to its reputation.
Unconference
JCrete is an unconference; the attendees create the program. Every day starts with a “marketplace”, where anyone can suggest a session. At JCrete, attendees then vote on the proposals and the most popular ones are scheduled in the available time slots and spaces. A session can be a presentation, but more often are discussions where people can share their thoughts and experience, and help others. It is much more interactive than a regular conference. Think of it as one big hallway track!
Sessions
There were lots of interesting sessions on Java, AI, and other topics. You can find notes on some of the sessions here, but you really have to experience it for yourself.
Java: Virtual Threads and Scoped Values
Some of my favorite sessions were the ones by José Paumard on Virtual Threads and Scoped Values. In this smaller setting, there was room for lots of discussions and sharing. At some point, I even managed to give José some tips for IntelliJ IDEA which he immediately applied. Did you know you can use the live templates iop and ior for IO.println() and IO.readln()?
Impromptu presentation
Several people in the session asked for more tips, and there happened to be some time left at the end of the session. The only available laptop was José’s machine: a Windows machine with a french keyboard! This was certainly an interesting challenge in doing my demo. With the help of José , I managed to show a few tips…
IntelliJ IDEA Tips & Tricks
This prompted me to suggest a session on IntelliJ IDEA Tips & Tricks for the next day. Here I managed to show all attendees something about IntelliJ IDEA they didn’t know yet, even my colleague Anton Arhipov (who has been using IntelliJ IDEA for much longer than I have).
When I told Pasha Finkelshteyn about this later, he asked me what it was because surely it would be something he didn’t know either. It turned out to be something he had been looking for recently!
The tip in question? You might know that you can use F2 to navigate to the next problem in a file (or Shift +F2 to go to the previous problem). By default, this cycles through problems by severity; errors first, warnings next, etc. To change this, hover over the Inspection Widget at the top right of the editor, click More (the three dots), click ‘Next Error’ Action (F2) Goes Through and select All Problems
Alternatively, you can use Search Everywhere (press Shift twice) to look for the setting The ‘Next Error’ action goes through in Settings | Editor | Code Editing and select All Problems there.
Code reading
Eleftherios Chrysochoidis suggest a session on code reading; a topic dear to my heart. Lots of interesting things were shared by the people in that session including Thaddeus Müller-Sarnowski, Ina Bumstein, Jakub Łątkiewicz, Lenny Primak, Marharyta Nedzelska. Of course I also shared links to some of my materials on this topic.
Other activities
JCrete is held on the beautiful island of Crete, which means lots of sun and the opportunity to visit lots of beaches. Fortunately, I also had the opportunity to join a trip to the botanical gardens with Gunnar Morling and his family; the gardens were beautiful, and shade and breeze were very welcome.
We also has the opportunity to visit an olive grove. Unfortunately, I was not able to buy any olive oil as I had only hand luggage.
We often ended up at Mylos near the beach in the (late) afternoon.
And in the evening there was time to enjoy delicious Greek food.
Thanks
After an amazing week, it was time to say goodbye. But not before getting the mandatory selfie with Heinz.
Many thanks to Heinz Kabutz, the disorganisers Ixchel Ruiz, Andres Almiray, Dmytro Vyazelenko and others for an unforgettable week! I hope to be back in the future…
