This year I choose to visit the Conference only. I’ve skipped the University as there were to many equal subjects with the conference. At the university you get a real in depth view on subjects but at the conference there are more different talks which triggers me to do more research myself.
This years Devoxx was less of an information overload then previous editions. Although there were many interesting subjects, I found myself wandering around in the hallway and the sponsors hall a lot. But no worries, I had my portion of fun and chatter in the sponsors hall. It’s only normal I wandered around the iText booth once every 2 hours as I’ve worked for them for 9 months. It was nice to see the XMLWorker demo in action as an iText power demo and to meet the newly hired internal developers of iText.
I also got to meet the faces behind JRebel. ( Speaking of that, I need to give an update on how much time it saved me since install )
Another opportunity I took, was having a chat with the guys from Terracotta (ehcache) and the jsr107 spec lead Greg Luck. More details about jsr107 in a later blog post.
In the upper hallway I finally got the time to catch up stories with Joachim.
And last but not least, thank you Oracle for the lucky draw in the contest, 3 books to read during commuting time!
Oh forgot some WiFi ranting: the WiFi sucked! Although there was a gigabit line and a supposedly available 9000 connections, I had a hard time getting connected with the netbook. That’s why I haven’t written any #DevoxxBlog yet. The Devoxx WiFi also triggered my HTC Wildfire to reboot once every 2 hours or so.
Enough ranting now. Overall I had fun at Devoxx and picked up some new ideas and tools to check out. I’ll post them later this week or month when I find the time.
Thank you Stephan!