JHUG event 07.06.2008 - being a hardcore .java developer and jhug-er
So this is it, another JHUG event (Sponsored by Sun Hellas this time) has come to an end. I am actually very happy, and I would like to share my thoughts on this one, despite the fact that this event was not packed - like the previous.
It is a beautiful Saturday here in Athens, summer is just in the corner (or just arrived) so when we arranged up this event we knew that the majority of people in a Saturday morning like this, in a country like Greece, would most probably go to the beach or enjoy the sunshine!
I was really surprised, very happy to see something like 60 to 70 JHUG members attending, so I thought dude this is the hard core of our community!
For me, this community keeps growing, slowly over time but as the time passes by I see new people coming, more commitment from hardcore members and thirst for more events more gatherings etc.
I am also very happy that we've managed to have the local Sun department as a sponsor and the way we organized the whole event, smoothly with no conflicts can be seen at least as a promising fact for the future. Every JUG in the world needs help and the local sun representatives are always a nice partner to consider. So, yes I am very happy for that!
We had a sudden change of plans in the morning, since the OpenSolaris Evangelist could not attend due to some sudden project needs and conflicts! So a big coffee break and for those attending early enough and some goodies. One of the most interesting things were the 2 OpenSolaris CDs (1 DVD 1 Cd, Live and proper installation). Eventually i don't know if everyone managed to get one BUT if you did not manage to get one, please email me and I will try to make sure that you will get some of these. I have to admit I kept 1 copy for me as well, since I was reading the other day Brian Leonard's post, about installing Open Solaris to his MacBookPro .
So I opened - the event with a quick greeting - and giving away books and tshirts. I was trying to find the best way of giving these freebies to the audience, so I decided to encourage the new members. I spotted the newcomers -(some of them ladies - another sucess!) and they got the books and tshirts.
Our first speaker was M.Kondratyev, who traveled from Russia in order to present us the latest developments of Netbeans 6.1, it's features and things to be expecting in future releases. It was his first time in Greece.
After a short break, Mark Newton from JBoss(RedHat) was on stage presenting mostly about the JBoss community, the new JBoss strategy through the RedHat perspective, the new growth model and how it relates to the the past and the future! I have to admit i found his talk very interesting because through the questions that came from the audience we were able to ask things like - is JBoss going to change is core model of open source and professional open source? Is there any chance that semi proprietary services to added to his model? Is the community still important for the jboss world?Can we trust jBoss? Mark had some nice answers on all of these - questions that are very common now days in lot's of technical leader's sessions! He finished his presentation by talking about the upcoming jBoss 5 application server and some exotic features (ok really jboss is going to rule if all of these gonna work- so I am just waiting for the first releases). Dimitris Andreadis the jBoss Dev Team Leader was in the audience as well. Dimitri we are waiting
After Mark, for the first in a public java event and for JHUG of course was Kirk Pepperdine! Every java developer must know Kirk and if you don't, then rush to his weblog and website start reading his posts about perfomance tuning and concurrency. It is always a pleasure to watch Kirk's talks! For sure you cant just go through in few lines - describing the essence of such a talk - but I can tell you for sure- every time I liste to Kirk I always keep in my mind how serious I must be now or in the near future when I code or when I design something - regarding concurrency and perfomance and multithreaded cpus (servers).
Big Lunch break - very nice I would say, and the last speaker for the day was ready.
I was very happy to have a for the first time in Greece a Jboss Project leader - Manik Surtani of j boss Cache!Well for sure manik is leading a very interesting project that is a core component for many projects and is used in large projects as well. Manik is a very cool speaker and his talk was smooth and enjoyable! I enjoyed his Q&A session and this conversation that developed between him, Kirk and mark on caches distributed caches and clustering!
And that was the end! I would like to thank all the hardcore JHUGers for attending.I was really happy because I had to opportunity to see again some old friends, meet new people and of course listen to some important java people form the java world! See you again with a proper event on October (I think). During summer I will have the time to think of new stuff, new ideas and maybe new initiatives around JHUG. For sure JHUG is live and kicking the java community is strong and this is the power of java
Java + You!
Happy Java coding!