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Devoxx Day 3

It was a very busy day, and unfortunately I could not live update - but better late than never.It's my first time to use ScribeFire as well, let's see how it will perform.

So this was the official start of the Devoxx - Conference. The previous 2 days are usually marked as University. Official key notes are held during the Conference days. Most of the people attending are targeting the conference, so it was quite busy from the morning. We are 3 greeks now, D.Andreadis who is currently managing the team around Jboss Application joined the small greek devoxx audience.

So the keynote. It was split into 3 mini 1 hour sessions. First of all it was Oracle, then Sun and then Adobe. I was quite interested on the Oracle one, the big question during this conference and some others to come - is what about Java? what about the merge? why is going to happen to this and that technology.

Steve Harris from Oracle stepped up, and started quite nice I have to admit. A bit of humour and some slides about Oracle. And that was the end of it - (5 mins nice - the rest boring and confusing). Suddenly slides saying that this presentation was reviewd by laywers - no comments about the merge - and again no comments about the merge. He was wearing a GlassFish T-shirt - showing some kind of new corporate bonding but it was quite fake in my eyes. Some minutes later they started demo-ing something called Weblogic - DM. A modular version of Weblogic based on Microkernels and profiles. Reminded me some Spring stuff a lot. A small web app was also there written...not in Java but in Scala (WFT!!!). So we had an oracle manager wearing a GlassFish tshirt- demoing Weblogic- DM with the assistance of a tie enabled developer (WTF!!!) and they were showing a Scala mini web app which did not work, and an oracle propriatery management tool for the server. Most probably the worst keynote ever..or at least the worst talk I have seen in all the Javapolis - Devoxx I have ever attended.

I stayed for the next session which was about J2EE 6 and what is currently happening. Speakers were the 2 main spec leads. Lots of interesting stuff , mainly covered by previous J2EE 6 sessions anyway. The big news is that on Dec 10th J2EE6 will be final and official! Great news and now we all have to wait for the majority of application servers supporting them. Eventually I would highly considered adopting lots of the new features - I am certain that will pay off in productivity and flexibility on the long term.

I have to admit I skipped the Adobe keynote, even though most of people seemed to like it. I am not that interested in their stack nor their technologies. I guess when i have to I will catch up. At the moment i preferer to stay focused on what I really do @ work and what puts me on the regular payrol.

Quick break and back for a JDK 7 Update by Mark Reinhold. One of the most interesting talks about the upcoming changes on the JDK and in general on the Java language to an certain extend. The bad news is that JDK 7 and all the related changes will be available sooner than Sept 2010. Now when it comes to specific things, the big announcement was that Java 7 is going to include closures!!! but in a simpler form that we have seen in various papers and talks during the last 4 years (BGGA etc.). It seems that after so many years still the majority of Java developers feel a bit weird. Personally I have not decided if I really really want closures. I mean you could still have them and not use it.

Lunch break (lots of people) and it's time for the father of Java. It is always inspiring to see the James Gosling, even if his presentation is not tottaly related to topics that you are mostly interested. This time he presented a pet project of his, that now is being developed as a service by Sun, the famous Java Store. A JavaFX application that is very close to the famous apple store, but for java applications. At the time being a prototype is out and the weird thing due to legal implications is that only US citizens can use it and sell opr buy apps. They are working with local legal and tax departments to resolve issues but is going to take a while. I have to admit i was not so much impressed about the whole stuff on the other hand maybe a new mini market is emerging for the legions of pure java developers world wide. Ah... by the way..James Gosling has been presenting using a Mac..again. So he is back ...to the apple borg ship!! hehehe!

After a loonger break (I needed one) I attended my last proper talk of the day. Project Coin by Joseph D.Darcy. I heard about project coin during the JDK7 talk. Actually project coin is an initiative to gather - evaluate and push all these small but important improvements we want on the Java language - that will make our development experience better. Very very interesting stuff, since these are the changes that will come to our IDE in some months. New ways of using collections and maps, some really powerfull but dangerous at the same time constructs for concurrent programming (see ForkJoin). Unfortunately no multi  exceptions catch statements , that was really something I am in great favor. If you want to see what is coming , have a look on the official site of project Coin.

Another short break and it was time for the famous JUG leaders BOF. Quite a few new faces comparing to previous years, and some old good friends. The most important thing was that James Gosling was there, trying to answer any question coming from the community, but nothing related to the merge. It quite strange since lots of people were just eager to know about the future of Sun and the future of Java. I have my moment as well and I did 2 questions. It seems that everyone enjoyed them. So the first one was -

1. 'what is your impression about the evolution of Java, lots of buzz for dynamic jvm hosted languages, java slowly evolving are we getting closer to the era of - java becoming the next COBOL?

2. Can you make a comment about the terrible findbugs metrics posted in a presentation yesterday about the latest oracle jdbc driver?

Eventually after the second question all the room was laughing.James Gosling decided to skip the second one saying ..what is the first question again..and here is what briefly what he answered.

Eventually he said yes we are sort of becoming the next COBOL. The reason that the language is not evolving fast enough is that there is a huge community and many involved parties that constantly have contradicting views about even the smallest changes. The process of updating the language spec has become very painful.

It was quite answer by the inventor of Java but the most interesting thing came a few minutes later. Someone asked him - what is your biggest fear and concern about Java? He replied...actually it is the previous question - meaning Java not to become absolutely the new COBOL. He pointed out that the usage of Java world wide is huge, it is inevitable that legacy systems will exist and maybe some java systems are already considered like that. He still believes though that new features should be added to the language and we have still way to go and Java can stay fresh and alive for a long time.

When it comes to the new dynamic languages that are gaining momentum lately, like for example Scala (there is a huge trend here in Devoxx about Scala), he said that Scala, Ruby and all the other JVM based languages are fine, but there is a big problem. They are domain specific. Meaning their whole existence is focused on certain things and they do not come close enough to the way java is considered to be an all around language! He pointed out that Scala is cool, but you need to see 5 times a scala talk to start understanding what is going on!

I could not agree more..with him. I have the same opinion on these new cool dynamic languages. Yes..good for some stuff but eventually we still do things with all around languages, which are widely adopted, fit to the majority of the developers available and have good solid mechanisms. If you ask me, what new language I would prefer to learn, it would be something really close to the profile of Java. I really think C# is a far better choice rather than Scala or whatever. Not because is very close to Java but it is an all around languages build on top of a proven concept (the Java concept) adding new interesting stuff that Java has missed!

Very nice experience anyway, the BOF and I was very happy to see good old friends, talk about how the crisis has affected our JUG operations, and how our JUG's are going to exist after the merge. Eventually the answer is simple. Nothing will change as long as Java exists- java local communities will exist and will try to talk and promote the use of our 'beloved' language! Yaaay!

The night was over with a late night lunch along with the whole JBOSS team. I was very lucky to meet and talk with various important Jbossians or see some old speakers again like Manik Surtani (creator of Infinispan). Thanks Dimitri for the invite anyway, it was inspiring.

A nice day..should end with a nice photo..and for a Java developer is only one!!

ps)scribefire is not bad at all by the way.

Devoxx University Day 2

Day two, here we go again. Early wake up - quick breakfast and off we go to the metropolis venue center.  This year the exhibition area was almost prepared from uni day 2 with corporate stands. The tshirt and freebies hunting has just began. I got a really nice agile board - and i hope that they are going to let me post it above my desk back at work from (ACA).

So my first choice of the day was, The Java EE 6 Platform by Antonio Goncalves and Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine.

J2EE 6 spec is bringing more and significant improvements to the the J2EE world and is considered a milestone. J2EE becomes more flexible, offers flexibility on the potential profiles of usage (web , enterprise), adopts many of the features that Spring has - so that now Spring users can stop saying - you dont have this you dont have that - instead they started saying ' we used to have this and that for years'. Haha anyway I was always on the J2EE side and I am very happy to see so many improvements. I hope the app server vendors to really jump into the spec and provide fast enough implementations. I think that it is not going to take as much as j2ee5  took. Anyway - it was a very concrete presentation. Antonio and Alexis managed to cover all of the major changes and features within 3 hours + providing demos. You can find the almost final spec here (it is indeed quite large). I am just going to comment about my favorite new featurers.

• EJB lite : As the name suggests - EJB support with transactions, security no remoting, no JMS, no WServices. Eventually when you think about it - this is something very close to Spring basic features. Servers may provide implementation for this limited profile - for example imagine Tomcat support lite EJB's or any other known servlet container.
• Singleton EJB's. Per application, per vm. A feature that many times i wish i had it out of the box. There were cases where I have used extensions offered by the containers - for example the Jboss was offering for a long time now Singletons (nice one). Now it is a spec and I hope to see it in the modern app servers.
• Asynchronous invokes on session beans! Yet another feature personally I was missing from the spec - still there were available work around but I am glad that now is official. Read about it here.
• Servlet 3.0 : Even though I am not currently developing servlets - the new features are very promising. My favorite was the async servlet invocation. In other words invoke a servlet known method with fire and forget capabilities. This is in general a limitation of many web frameworks as well. Even nowdays  we still use JMS to glue our web layer with an async mechanism and do not block the web layer (meaning the user) because of a long running server side invocation!
• Better and more concrete naming conventions on JNDI!! At last !!!
• Less xml configuation in general
• Simpler packaging or wars or ears!

Many many other new things - that IMHO make the new spec attractive to a variety of different users. I think slowly (ok took some time I agree) - we can see that j2ee features are available to users that were mostly confused or afraid to touch anything related to this - because of the complexity and high learning curves. J2EE is really getting sexy. Of course there is always the argument of Spring...but what can I say..on this battle I will stay with the standards ;). Personal preference as usual.

The second talk of the day was something that I have never used. Hibernate Search university: full-text search for Hibernate by Emmanuel Bernard. 

Very interesting and solid talk, the E.B really masters the topic and many others related to Hibernate, he is part of the J2EE 6 expert group anyway.Hibernate Search is a mechanism that integrates the use of Apache Lucene (engine mostly used on text searching functinality) with a Hibernat-ed application with entities and other db entities. Personally I have seen examples in some projects with direct integration of Lucene into the project but never tried Hibernate Search. It seemed to be a well working technology and definitely if you already have a hibernated domain model + application and you want to benefit from Lucene's powers in the area of text searching - it is the way to go! Really constructive talk + and something new for me. Will definetely consider it for future projects if such a requirement comes.

Next one - a very very interesting one! I have to admit I have not heard before about Java - Monitor. The idea (if i get it correct is the following). There is community of users who can download a specific probe (actually a small war) for their application server of choice - which actually samples during your  application run times - garbage collection activity and other statistics. These are presented with a nice web ui and can be used for further investigation. See details here and register to the forum! Nice talk from the creator of Java Monitor, Kees Jan Koster who is a very good speaker and fun to listen . I wish he was allocated some more time - since his findings and statements are very very relevant for any modern j2ee application that has performance issues (almost all of them have - and if you think that yours hasn't) try Java monitor or use FindBugs!!! You will find the talk slides here. One of the best points of this talk is a FindBugs Metric from the Oracle latest Jdbc driver. 1048 findbugs warnings, direct calls to System.exit (WTF) and infite loops!! Shame on you Oracle :P !

That is all about for today when it comes to talks. Most probably will try to visit one more BOF related to the Play framework.

Twitter is the service that currently has transformed this year's devoxx to something very interactive. During the talks - commenting or status updates make the whole thing very interesting to attend. I have to admit I am abusing it a bit (well i know know some of my followers will have already unfollowed me - but I really try to use the #devoxx tag  - trying to decouple the whole activity with my regular one (which is not significant).

Last but not least - i had the chance to find @ the Atlassian booth Don Brown. If you have ever used Struts 1 or Struts 2.x you must have heard of him! Really nice to talk to him - I had realy enjoyed his talk during JavaONE 2007 about the newly created (at that time) Struts 2. It is quite unfortunate that he is not involved so much any more and at the same time - it is quite unfortunate no Struts 2 talk this year. We are being bombarded with JSF sessions every day- there is no escape. This is a case which I dont like the spec haha - just to contrast my previous J2EE 6 statements of faith.

As a heavy JIRA and confluence user I had the chance to see all the updates on the new versions and I was very happy to know that currently in my workplace an update to JIRA 4 is coming soon. Searching has improved so must (a very important activity for JIRA users). I also managed to get a very cool JIRA T-shirt - perfect much for high load JIRA working days :D!

That is all for now - tomorrow is the very first conference day...busy enough - a James Gosling session in place actually!

By the way at last - i found another greek , a good old friend  and JUH-ger John.K. He is blogging as well so. check him out!

Devoxx University day 1

Well here we are again - day one of the university. There are still lots of people ,maybe a bit less comparing to previous years! Anyway the idea remains the same, excellent talks, nice line up, nice venue..here we go!

My first talk of the day is one of my favorites anyway. JBPM4 in Action (Tom Baeyens and Joram Barrez).

In the past year I have been heavily involved along with a team of other experienced developers to develop (actually to redevelop) complex business needs for a large distributed enterprise application which was struggling when using a proprietary BPM engine. In the recent months we have managed to accomplish and master our business domain by using JBPM comparing to 1.5 years on the other technologies. I am a huge supporter of JBPM so I wanted to see an overview of the new version. It seems that truly JBPM evolves and satisfies complex needs that are mostly related to the real pain of developing business processes. Pain a) mind the gap between analysts and developers b) give the developers access to complex mechanisms so they can tune transactions, deployment, maintenablity. We have been using JBPM 3.2.6 and given its open source nature we were able to hack on several places and tune or alter some things (mostly related to to the way the state machine is using its executor engine how it uses and how transactions behave). During the talk i saw that most of the problems we were discussing some months ago and we were trying to find nice and smart ways on solving them - are mostly covered by the new release plus more more new stuff. Better eclipse designer, a potential web designer mostly for analysts, new better engineered API where you can 'inject' your own custom behavior inside the JBPM core without hacking 100% the core code - see Interceptors on the Command service and Job executors, better Eventlisteners etc. Lots of nice stuff that you can have a look on the official site - have a look on release 4.2. I gained my JBPM 4 T-shirt with a couple of questions mostly concerning the evolution of command executors and how easy it is to migrate from 3 to 4. Actually the answer to the latter is that if you have a fine grained and tuned 3.2 release and satisfies your needs do not move to fast to 4. Quite reasonable but at the same time I have to say that you must really sure that you have accomplished everything with 3 meaning - version 4.2 offers things out of the box (almost) in critical areas like transactions. Check them out and decide! I will definitely attending the BOF later on! I am JBPM die hard I guess!!

Next big talk was about development on the Amazon Elastic Cloud (EC2) and the various problems or features you might have using the cloud if you want to build cloud enabled application. The presenter Chris Richardson a Java Champion and founder of CloudFountry.com gave a really solid talk. Eventually developing in the cloud has lots of advantages but at the same time lots of disadvantages. Latetly I have been discussing these various issues with friends and we were concluding that there are still problems. Eventually during the talk the speaker gone through all these questions and concerns, gave answers or workarounds to some of them or made some others more severe for me - meaning I have not thought of them. I am gonna use this talk when is releases to Parleys or to a similar service as a reference - for sure.  Eventually I decided to skip the JSF sessions (which i still dislike ...its been for years now haha) and my choice was rewarded since the EC2 session was really - interesting!

After a break i joined the Hades framework session. I have to admit - i was not so much impressed of it. It seems that adds a bit more extra effort for maintenance to the developer - offering though some nice helps during development. I really don't know which one is better. I think I prefer sticking to the JPA spec and the known ways of using it rather than adding extra small layers. Maybe I am bit conservative on this or... addicted to  Hibernate a lot :P .

After Hades I stayed on the same room, joining a very interesting but rather small talk about the No SQL movement and tools like HBase and Cassndra (see Hadoop). Actually I am still skeptic about the whole movement but I really liked one of the speaker's argument he said 'look around you - famous and very large applications on the web do not use Relational Databases for their massive data!' Anyway it always depends on the case I think but - it is true! You really need to try - forgetting your relational knowledge in order to fully understand how to model something to these new tools. Excellent talk - I wish I could join their BOF as well - but it is on the same slot with JBPM (which as I said...I am die hard - haha). Definitely though going to have a closer look on HBase or Cassandra.

That is the end for today's regular sessions. I am planning to attend a couple of BOF's (really trying hard to keep up with the pace). It is a really demanding thing - if you want to join several sessions, take notes - stay focused. But it is fun and it is really nice to see old friends from the Java world ..coming in. At the same time, I made several notes new ideas and new questions came up, that is a real indication of how good a conference is!Well I missed my conference days :). I am back, even though I still feel a bit weird hanging around..with an arm strap. :D. Well ...

Η Αμβέρσα με άλλο μάτι ...

Φτάσαμε λοιπόν. Μετά απο μία απροβλημάτιστη πτήση με τα νέα Airbus  της Aegean - και μία μικρή έκπληξη κατά την διάρκεια του video των οδηγιών ασφαλείας. Μικρός ο κόσμος και μεγάλες οι ομορφιές της Χίου μόνο αυτό έχω να πω!!!

Ήταν ένα υπέροχο πρωινό στην Αθήνα - φαντάζομαι πολλοί θα κατέβηκαν κέντρο για έναν φθινοπωρινό καφέ. Ο ήλιος βέβαια μετά από καμία ώρα πτήσης και καθώς είχαμε ήδη περάσει στον εναέριο χώρο της Γερμανίας μας άφησε. Συννεφιά και πάλι συννεφιά!

Προσγείωση στις Βρυξέλλες on time και αναμονή κανένα μισάωρο για την λιλιπούτεια βαλίτσα μου - που για κάποια στιγμή νόμιζα ότι την είχε μπερδέψει ένας γείτονας Τούρκος και είχε κάνει φτερά για την Πόλη (transiting).

Κρύο έχει αλλά όχι τρομερό. 10-12 βαθμοί χωρίς αρκετό αέρα, πράγμα που κάνει τα πράγματα αρκετά normal. Αλλαγή στον Brussels Nord και βουρ για τελικό προορισμό.

Ομολογώ ότι όλη η κατάσταση με την σπασμένη κλείδα αλλά και ότι ταξίδευα μόνος - δεν με ενθουσίαζε τόσο πολύ. Απο την άλλη σκεφτόμουν ότι είναι  καλή ευκαιρία να πάρω λιγο τις ανάσες μου - μόνος - να επικεντρωθώ και στα του συνεδρίου .  Φυσικα άπειρος χρόνος για ενδοσκόπηση και ίσως πλάνα για το μέλλον.

Φτάσαμε στην Αμβέρσα και μάλλον κάποιος μεγάλος μας κάνει την χάρη. Ο καιρός αλλάζει και ένα ωραίο ηλιόλουστο σε μεγάλο βαθμό  μεσημέρι. Check in ξενοδοχείο και ήδη μπορούσα να διακρίνω στο φουαγιέ κάποιες γνωστές Java προσωπικότητες. Όλα καλά και ωραία με το HolidayInn express (σχεδόν δηλαδή) - αλλά αυτο το κλέψιμο που κάνουν στην χρήση internet με 12 euro οι 12 ώρες είναι απαράδεκτο. Του χρόνου θα προτιμήσω να πάω σε κανένα χειρότερο αρκεί να έχει πιο ευνοικές τιμές για wifi! Τρομερή διαφορά με το Circus στο Βερολίνο - που το  wifi ήταν δωρεάν μέχρι και στις τουαλέτες του bar.

Λοιπόν και τώρα πάμε στα σχετικά με τον τίτλο. Είναι η τρίτη φορά (νομίζω) που έρχομαι στην Αμβέρσα. 2006, 2007 και 2009. Ο λόγος το Javapolis  τώρα πια Devoxx. Τις πρώτες χρονιές περνούσα τον πιο πολύ χρόνο εδώ στο συνέδριο και μετά σαν τρελός έτρεχα στις Βρυξέλλες - μιας και μου άρεσαν και αρέσουν πολύ! Φταίει εκείνο το φοβερό σύντομο tour απο την ευγενέστατη Beta Blank που δεν θα ξεχάσω ποτέ και ακόμα την ευχαριστώ. Είχα γυρίσει τα βασικά της πόλης, την μεγάλη πλατεία, καθεδρικό, την αγορά κτλ. Είχα περπατήσει λίγο και ένα βράδυ στο λιμάνι.  Μέγα λάθος..το λίγο. Η Αμβέρσα είναι ένα από τα πιο μεγάλα και παλιά λιμάνια της Ευρώπης - το..παλιό της λιμάνι είναι απο τα πιο ωραία μέρη να περπατήσεις. Ουσιαστικά ανακάλυψα την πόλη για δεύτερη φορά.

 Περπάτησα μέχρι το κέντρο και αφού πέρασα στα αριστερά μου την όπερα έστριψα δεξιά για να βγώ στην οδό Mier που έχει και το μεγαλύτερο αριθμό μαγαζιών (ρουχα κτλ κτλ). Έχω την εντύπωση ότι έχει πολυ μεγαλύτερη αγορά απο τις Βρυξέλλες. Μέχρι τώρα γνωστά όλα!Συνέχισα στην επίσης γνωστή Grooenplatz , την διέσχησα διαγώνια και ανέβηκα την Jan Bloomstraat για να καταληξω στη επίσης γνωστή τριγωνική πλατεία που βρίσκεται και το hilton.  Συνεχίζουμε δεξιά στην γνωστή Grote Markt και εκεί περίπου τελείωναν τα όσα ήξερα!

Τι μαλακία τα πιο ωραία είναι μετά!Λίγα μέτρα πιο κάτω η οδός Suikerrui σε βγάζει στο λιμάνι! Πάνω στην προβλήτα με απίστευτη θέα και ουσιαστικά την πραγματικό πρόσωπο της πόλης!  Ανέβηκα στην 'εναέρια΄προβλήτα η οποία με έβγαλε σε μια καφετέρια-μπυραρία φάρο. Συνέχισα όλο ευθεία μέχρι το μάτι μου έφτασε κοντά στο σύγχρονο λιμάνι και τις υπερυψωμένες πολυκατοικίες από container.

Ωραίο απόγευμα καθαρός αέρας, θαλασσινός , αρκετές οικογένειες έξω , ποδηλάτες αλλά και δρομείς. Μουσική στο iphone με ενδιάμεσα κενά για να σουτάρω - photo!

Έφτασα μέχρι το τέλος του λιμανιού ( μετά δεν έχει να δεις  τίποτα)  και γύρισα πίσω. Μόνο που αντί να κάνω πάλι την παραλιακή, κάποια στιγμή στρίβω δεξιά και μπαίνω σε έναν γεμάτο με κόσμο παράδρομο την Hoogstrat! Έχω καιρό να δω τόσο ωραίο και παράξενο δρόμο. Γεμάτος απο μαγαζιά με παλιά έπιπλα, αντίκες αλλά και νέα σχέδια. Παράξενες gallery με εκθέματα που μπορούσα να καταλάβω, μαγαζιά με χαλιά και άλλα με κοσμήματα -(χρυσό). Ενδιάμεσα μικρές μπυραρίες που μπορεί να χωρούσαν μόλις 10 άτομα να σου λένε - έλα έλα. Αλλά μόνος δεν μου έκανε καρδιά. Cafe και bistro να σου παίρνουν την μύτη ενώ οι πλανόδιοι με τις βάφλες σε βάζανε σε πειρασμό κάθε 10 λεπτά! Πραγματικά μία άλλη πόλη ήταν μπροστά μου. Χάρηκα αρκετά που κατάφερα να ολοκληρώσω την εικόνα που είχα ξεκινήσει πριν μερικά χρόνια.

Συνέχισα ξανά μέχρι το κέντρο όπου και ανέβηκα στην γραμμή nr6 και προορισμό τον χώρο που θα γίνει το συνέδριο για pre-registration, τσαντούλες tshirt και λίγα νέα από τον οργανωτή και φίλο Stephan J.

Φωτό απο την πολύ ωραία και ενδιαφέρουσα περιήγηση μου στην Αμβέρσα! iPhone πάντα!

Σοβαρές δόσεις Java..Devoxx here I come!

Είχα έλλειψη, περσυ δεν πειρα την δοση μου. Φετος ακομα και με σπασμενη κλειδα θα βρεθώ στο Devoxx 2009. Δεν είναι και το πιο εύκολο να μαζεύεις το σπίτι και να φτιάχνεις μια βαλίτσα με σχεδόν 1 χέρι και κάτι ψηλά - αλλά τι να κάνεις η Java θέλει θυσίες.

Αρκετοί συνάδελφοι μου θεωρούν το κόστος του ταξιδιού απαγορευτικό - η αλήθεια είναι ότι τα euro που δαπανήθηκαν απο το δικό μου πορτοφόλι δεν τα κλαίω καθόλου. Να σημειώσω ότι σε αντίθεση με άλλους - πηγαίνω σε τέτοια event χωρίς να έχω την κάλυψη εταιριών για αεροπορικά - η ξενοδοχείο. Είναι ένα δώρο που κάνω στον εαυτό μου και στη καριέρα μου σχεδόν κάθε χρόνο. Για όσο μπορώ και αντέχω. Ναι δεν λέω θα ήταν cool να τα πλήρωνε κάποιος άλλος - αλλά επειδή στην ελληνική πραγματικότητα αυτά δεν συμβαίνουν πάντα και συχνά - ποτέ δεν αρκέστηκα στα τυπικά.

Αν είχα αρκεστεί δεν θα είχαμε ποτέ φιάξει το jhug. Τι είναι το jhug μια προσπάθεια μας να φέρουμε ομιλητές εδώ - να δώσουμε την ευκαιρία σε όλους που όχι μονο η κάθε εταιρία τους δεν πλήρωνε αλλά δεν μπορούσα να θυσιάσουν 500-1000 euro για την χαρά του παραστείς σε ένα συνέδριο. Αγαπάω αρκετά την δουλειά μου - την γουστάρω και όσο μπορώ θα είμαι στις επάλξεις. Η χαρά του να ακους μεγάλους στον χώρο, να μοιράζεσαι προβληματισμούς, να μειώνεις τις αποστάσεις και να κάνεις νέους επαγγελματικούς φίλους. Πλούσιος δεν είμαι - μακάρι δηλαδή αλλά με καλο και έξυπνο προγραμματισμό μπορείς να το πετύχεις.

Φέτος το Devoxx μάλλον όχι sold out -αλλά πάλι πάνω απο 2500 συμμετοχές - θα ρωτήσω την Κυριακή τον Stephan για το ακριβές νούμερο. Αυτός ο έξυπνος και λαμπρός Βέλγος - όχι μόνο δεν αρκέστηκε στην στατική γι άυτον Βελγική πραγματικότητα. Το hobby το έκανε επάγγελμα και μετά ξανά hobby και συνεχίζει.

Προορισμός Βρυξέλλες αύριο πρωί πρωί - στο δεξί χέρι μια μικρή βαλίτσα και το laptop - το αριστερό στον φάκελο - νάρθηκα. Άφιξη στην αγαπημένου μου πρωτεύουσα - τραίνο για Αμβερσα και μετά στο γνώριμο HolidayInn express όπου όλος ο καλός ο κόσμος μένει. Έχει πλάκα να μοιράζεσαι διάδρομο ξενοδοχείου με γνωστούς Java Star! Το 2007 στο τότε Javapolis ειχα την τύχη να εκπληρώσω το τότε μου όνειρο ως Java προγραμματιστής και να μιλήσω με τον James Gosling - φέτος ακόμα μια ευκαιρία, μιας και ο μπαμπας της Java θα είναι εκεί. Θα υπάρξει σχετικό BOF με τους community leaders αλλά το δείπνο των JUG leader + java champions.

Στο iphone υπάρχει ήδη εγκατεστημένη εφαρμογή με το Conference guide (γαμώ) και επίσης σε iCal events  τα session κάθε μέρας. Έχω ήδη επιλέξει 90% απο τις ομιλίες που θα πάω οπότε το καλό και πιστό μου iphone θα φροντίζει να με ενημερώνει μερικά λεπτά πριν που και πότε ξεκινάει η επόμενη ομιλία.

Στην μικρή βαλίτσα ρούχα ζεστά με μυρωδιά φρεσκοπλυμένου (με ένα χέρι βάζεις πλυντήριο χαχα) και ένα ζεστό παλτό.

Αποφάσισα να μην πάρω την φωτογραφική μου. Σημάδι απο το προηγούμενο ταξίδι. Τα 3 mpixel και η ευκολία του να είναι απλά στην τσέπη σου - (iphone) είναι ότι πιο εύχρηστο. Mail, twitter , facebook , photo και video στο τηλέφωνο μου. Σκέφτομαι εξαιτίας της κατάστασης μου να μην κουβαλάω το laptop στο συνέδριο και να συνδέομαι απο το τηλέφωνο για τα βασικά.

Το macboookpro μάχημο. Ήρθε στην ζωή μου μετά απο το πρώτο μου javapolis το 2006 - το είχα στα χέρια μου την ημέρα που γύρισα. Θυμάμαι άφησα την βαλίτσα στο σπίτι , είπα στους δικούς μου- ότι πρέπει να πάω κάπου -και πήγα να το παραλάβω. 3+ χρόνια χρήσης. Σε λίγες μέρες θα δώσει την τελευταία του παράσταση στα χέρια μου. Σαν σκυλί δούλεψε και το μόνο που θέλει είναι μια καινούργια μπαταρία. Τα χαρακτηριστικά του ειναι αρκετά δυνατά και για τα σημερινά δεδομένα Core2Duo, 2 giga κτλ κτλ και θα συνεχίζει να υπηρετεί. Όσο για το τι ...έχουμε μετά...ε με την επιστροφή (όπως και τότε).

Φέτος σε αντίθεση με τις άλλες φορές θα είμαι μόνος - ο καλός φίλος και Jhuger Πάνος, μένει πίσω. Μου κακοφαίνεται λίγο - έχουμε περάσει πολλές καλές στιγμές εκεί - μέσα και έξω απο το συνέδριο. Μεγάλες δόσεις Java αλλά και μπύρας στα σοκάκια της Αμβέρσα, στο φουαγιέ του ξενοδοχείου να βγάζουμε φωτό με τον δημιουργό του Spring και να του λέω μισο μεθυσμένος ότι το Spring δεν λέει μία χα χα χα! Ακόμα θυμάμαι το βλέμμα του. Δεν πειράζει φίλε...το 2010 δεν είναι μακριά.

Αυτά...τελευταίος έλεγχος - και off we go - νωρίς το πρωί με Aegean. Keep in touch κάθε βράδυ απο δευτέρα θα έχει - σχολιασμό!

για την τιμή των προγραμματιστών!

Εκτός απο το πολύ καλό (και πάλι) άρθρο εδώ. Κράτησα και ακόμα ένα καλό σχόλιο στο ίδιο thread!

"Ο προγραμματισμός είναι μία μάχη μεταξύ των προγραμματιστών και του σύμπαντος. Οι προγραμματιστές φτιάχνουν όλο και καλύτερα προγράμματα και το σύμπαν όλο και μεγαλύτερους ηλίθιους. Μέχρι τώρα το σύμπαν κερδίζει."

εύγε!! χε χε χε!