from my work as a developer
Posts tagged conference
shared experience
Nov 21st
The 10th annual Devoxx conference is over and I was there, honey & win drank [1] 
It was my second time when I’ve participated in the Devoxx conference and it was the second time like almost all of us from SoftwareMill were joining the conference together. What can I say, it was worth to be there, to meet people from around the world and to have fun for all of the three days (in fact, four days ).
Maybe I wasn’t so happy to see so many Android related talks, but there were few talks that I enjoyed.
First was about how to become an awesome developer by Diabolical Developer aka Martijn Verburg and this talk filled out the gap in my thinking about how to be a great developer and how to follow all those shiny stars like Uncle Bob and others. I cannot say that everything is clear and perfect, but at last I’m not alone with my thoughts – there are other. If you’ll have opportunity to join that talk, I real encourage you to do that.
The second talks was given by Matt Raible about his Play Framework learning experience. It was very funny and educational as well. As always, Matt was very well prepared to give his talk and I real enjoyed it. He inspired me how can I learn Scala. So the plan is to learn Scala with Play Framework.
Another great thing was the OSS dinner with friends from the Apache Struts community – Rene, Rainer and Philipe and few others. Nice to met people you know just from the Internet, to talk face to face and to drink few beers (especially belgian’s beers ). It was awesome, really enjoyed that moment, hope we can meet next year as well.
Right now, after catching up mails, todos, I’m back at work with few ideas to implement. And in context of the conference and sharing experience I’m recommend you to see that TED’s presentation – share your experience 
How to make the Confitura ?
May 25th
Less than three weeks left to Confitura conference and we still have discussing with new Partners. Many of the local companies are supporting us, it’s so nice to see them with us! But it’s a hard work, lot of mails, phone calls and some paper work at the end. Especially it’s hard for me as a one of the Organizers – I’m ordinary Software Developer and quite often don’t understand what moves business forward
Anyway it can be the largest free of charge conference in Europe (regarding Java, software development, etc). Right now we have over 800 participants (some of them will give up just before the conference – as usual ), 13 Partners (and we’re discussing with another few), 20 lectors from around Poland – huge event and everything because of passion
So, if you don’t know what to do on 11th of June, come in and see how it is.
And at the end two presentation from TED – maybe not really, but they’re funny and practical as usual
and How to tie your shoes ?
reactivation
May 6th
I’ve decided to reactivate my technical blog (in Polish) hosted on Java Developer’s Network – why? I’ve stared missing strict technical entries and discussion over them. And there are plenty of english technical blogs out there, so I didn’t want to be another one here. I’m still planning to post some small examples in English, but larges one will be posted there.
Few weeks ago I was moved to join a new project and for last two weeks I was trying hard to recall how JSF 2.0 works. It isn’t an intuitive way and for a guy as me – who was growing up on request-response paradigmate of the Web - the whole components approach is a big fake The frameworks are cheating us and the users, http protocol is stateless and over it we try to build a statefull application. Jsfize are flying in the air 
What else is going on? A lot, I can say. A brand new Apache Struts 2 is out – the web page should be updated soon (on my todo list), also we’ve a few new very active contributors and a new PMC Chair. It looks like we’ve a new opening
The fourth thing, another we are working to prepare upcoming annual Warsaw Java User Group conference – Confitura 2011 aka Javarsovia. It’s a hard peace of wood now, but hopefully we redo it in something nicer
And the last thing – a new Agile conference in Warsaw is over the horizon – Agile By Example!
That’s it folks …. naha … what’s left is some new presentation from TED – not only software can be open sourced 
a bit confused
Apr 15th
Yup, I’m. I’m confused because of lack of good TED presentations for last few weeks. Maybe I’m wrong and there were some, please feel free to show me them, because if so, it means that’s something wrong with me
Never mind, back to business. I was working hard for last few weeks to release a new Apache Struts 2 version. The first attempt failed, as during the Vote progress a bug was detected – so it’s good, better sooner than later The second attempt is under Vote right now and I’m testing it – like a tester, by clicking here and there with the example Showcase application. It looks good, but Matt reported that tests for AppFuse are slower for version 2.2.3 comparing to version 2.1.8. Hmm… only two seconds but always …
I figured out how to check what can be wrong. In the latest version we’ve introduced mechanism to escape action’s name and method’s name as with Dynamic Method Invocation mechanism a hacker can use them for XSS attack. And as an Action is created per each request, that can slow down the whole framework. So I will use YSlow to measure load times for pages in the Showcase application, next I will rollback the changes regarding escaping and re-run the tests. And then compare the results.
Maybe it will give me the answer
Staying around the Apache Software Foundation – proposal to join ASF is almost ready for OGNL project – it’s a very good information as OGNL was homeless for some time. Many thanks to Simone for taking care of that, lot of good work!
Another thing, I’ve started or rather joined a new project or better an on-going project It’s for financial industry – again someone could say – but it’s something different from what I had been doing for a previous bank. Anyway it should be funny and interesting – lot of JSF2ise, CDIse and JBossise stuff will be flying in the air
What else is going on ? We’re working hard to prepare the next edition of the Warsaw JUG Conference – Confitura 2011 aka Javarsovia – see you there in June. On the beginning of May the GeeCON conference take place and hopefully I’ll be there as well.
more than expected
Nov 24th
The last few days / weeks were very buys for me and it wasn’t related to work
First I was presenting at JavaCamp #5 topic about self-development. You can find the slides and video here (sorry folks – only in Polish ). Besides me there were other lectures and they were presenting quite interesting topics
- Git by Konrad Malawski – how to use Git on daily basis
- Project Lombok – Cause We Hate Boilerplate! by Łukasz Żmudziński – no more getters/setters (but doesn’t work with IntelliJ IDEA
) - Testy jednostkowe i integracyjne w przykładach by Łukasz Czerpak – tests, tests and integration tests
In mean time pizza had arrived so there was time to discuss and socialize, what else I can say – very nice Saturday and looking for the next JavaCamp.
After that I was working hard on my project, maybe soon I’ll share more details. What can I say now is that I’m using the latest fancy stuff from Java EE world: JSF 2, CDI, EJB 3.1, JPA 2 (ok JSF 2 isn’t the coolest thing ).
Then the long weekend arrived – Independence Day – so I spent that time with my family at my parents-in-law. The most excited thing happend during returning – my wife hunted board by car
And came the Day – first time I’ve been participating in Devoxx conference. The journey had started at 10.00 AM from my home town and finished around 11.30 PM in All Seasons Hotel in Antwerpen – quite long as for 21st Century The whole SoftwareMill team were there with me!
The next three days were full of expected and unexpected experiences. Opening keynote was very cool – a bit too many people but Mark Reinhold was presenting very interesting topics about future of Java language. You know all that fancy tools like Lambda expressions, Closures, etc. Java 7 should be brilliant but Java 8 will be astonish
Lectures and presentations had very different levels of funny, essentiality and meeting expectations – from my point of view the same statement I can post about Javarsovia conference. So we don’t have to shame!
Anyway, presentation aren’t the main part of any conference. Also very important are people and discussions. During Devoxx I had plenty of both. I met other members of JetBrains Development Academy – we had very nice evening with dinner and few beers Thanks to Robert Dammer and other JetBrains guys and Ann
Next day I had pleasure to meet and talk to two Apache Struts committers – Rene Gielen and Rainer Hermanns. I missed the Open Source dinner, but I didn’t know about it early Next time. I also had chance talk to Matt Raible and Neal Ford – just few words but always…. There were also many guys and one girl from Poland – it was a great pleasure to meet you guys and drink some beers
After third day we had to come back, tired but with many new ideas and colleagues. What to say more – I’m very pleased that I was there and met all of you!
Cya next year!
PS. Few photos
this is the end
Jun 27th
Yes, what can I say more? Javarsovia 2010 conference is over! At least for attendees
Just to summarize in numbers:
- the first post to the internal management group was sent on 20th of November 2009 – it’s over 18 921 600 seconds or 315 360 minutes or 5256 hours or just 7 months ago
- till now the members of the management group posted more than 4000 posts, just in June over 1600
- 19 partners were supporting us: Javart, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Azul Systems, Oracle, Adobe, TouK, it Kontrakt, e-point, Tieto, Sages, Javatech, iStream, SoftwareMill, Helion, OVH.pl, Sun, Atlassian, ej-technologies
- over 900 people were registered and more than 650 attended
- 24 speakers
- 4 paths for 6 presentations it’s giving us 1080 minutes of spreading knowledge
- catering served more than 1 000 000 calories
- conference’s website was opened by over 8700 unique visitors
The numbers allow us to say the one final note: Javarsovia 2010 was the Nth* biggest Java conference in Europe! And everything for free!
See you soon – Javarsovia 2011 will be in less than 365 days
* – I made a tiny mistake calling Javarsovia 2010 “the 2nd biggest conference in Europe” – sorry for that!
overwhelm
Jun 18th
That’s it, I’m totally overwhelmed by organization of Javarsovia 2010 conference. For the last few days I’ve been hanging on a phone all day, discussing and answering sponsor’s questions. I wrote hundreds of mails to management board internal group. I have no more space in my daily schedule to read blogs
Hopefully it’s the last week and we are solved almost all the issues we had – shirts, catering, rooms, etc. We have more than 880 registered attendees! It’s two times more than last year!
Any way I found a little time to watch that very nice TED speech, it’s about how to start movement and be a leader – very interesting and all in three minutes!
PS. I’m also not able to write posts from work, something went wrong when I migrated my DNS server
day as usual
Oct 27th
I think it was a day as usual – I fixed some bugs (two ), prepared a presentation on Parleys.com and made some Web Services integration skeleton. And I had the second part of Communication training.
Day as usual
I started the day preparing the presentation, as a JUG we have a dedicated channel on beta.parleys.com where we are publishing materials from conferences or JUG events. All are in Polish so you have to know it It was about JBoss and clustering that it had been presented during Javarsovia 2009 conference! I also made a note about podcast from COOLuary v1 conference.
Then I fixed two simple bugs regarding print template that I had been working a while ago – they looked a quite hard, but we team-mate help it was a moment! Collective knowledge!
And at the end of work day I made skeleton for web service integration – I used more or less copy-paste pattern
After work we had a second part of Communication training – we learned a lot interesting things and behaviour about ourselves! I made some notes for future and maybe publish my thoughts lately!
warsjawa 2009 accomplished
Oct 26th
The Warsjawa 2009 conference is over! I think it was the first conference connected with Agile in Warsaw – there is a lot of such activities in Krakow, Wroclaw and so on – till that Warsaw hadn’t have such event!
And I have ideas for next “Agilities”
There was around 100 attendees, 50 pizzas and more the 200 water drinks And the best was that only half of the attendees were Java developers – that means we hit brought audience than we want I’m looking forward for next Agile events – maybe some user group or forum!
I hope my presentation was good and at least someone will get more and will be more effective (as I’m going to be
dark ages
Oct 6th
The whole last week was as black whole – without passion, hopeless and so one Maybe because of weather or something – Autumn is coming Nevertheless that’s over, today day was absolutely brilliant – I got my books from Amazon:
- The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential
- Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware (Pragmatic Programmers)
- Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity
As you can see, quite interesting readings – so the Autumn can be very productive period, especially when the weather will be bad
I also solved many bugs today and it was even nice – it wasn’t either boring nor frustrating – I was fascinated that I could help someone to achieve his goals. Passion!
The second main achievement today was meeting of Warsaw Design Patterns Group – we started implementing mentioned early application. It base on Maven 2, Wicket and on some common stuff like Hibernate and Spring. There was enormous pill of knowledge – we used TDD first methodology, with mocks base on Mockito. I never used Mockito before and I’m delighted what you can do with it! We developed almost the whole functionality within one hour! Well designated and suited! I’m looking forward what we do on the next meeting!
Preparation for Warsjawa are also going well – the agenda is almost done, the conference room is booked and the pizza is coming! We will be discussing about Scrum and Agile – from one person to distributed teams! If you are in Warsaw at 24. of October, come visit the conference!
