Wednesday, October 13, 2010

OpenBlend'10 - recap



It's been a week after my return from OpenBlend in Ljubljana/Slovenia and I had promised myself that I should write a few words about this (Java mostly) conference.

Already in its 3rd year, the conference organized by a local group of technology enthusiasts lead by El Presidente Ales Justin changed its name from JavaBlend to OpenBlend (for obvious reasons), but kept on its promise for delivering great lectures from established opensource developers.

I enjoyed the majority of talks, including Carlo de Wolf's talk on EJB3, Sanjeeb Sahoo's talk on OSGi/JavaEE and Jeff Brown's talk on fancy runtime meta-programming with Groovy (did I say I love Groovy?). The sessions were recorded and I believe they'll be made available online soon so you can check them out yourselves.

I was mostly intrigued by the keynote session of Sacha Labourey, my former (J)Boss and now founder of Cloud Bees, talking about his vision on Cloud 2.0 and the important role that PaaS will play in the years to come.

I also had the opportunity to present one of my favorite subjects, the secrets for "Becoming a Successful Open Source Developer". I've given this talk a couple of times and although it is usually well perceived among geeks, I was somewhat surprised this time to receive positive feedback not only from the people in the room, but also from bystanders outside the room and other helper staff who could hear it from the speakers. Which makes me think there must be some universal truth in the 7 elements of success I am suggesting in the talk. Interesting...

All in all, the conference was great, the speakers good, the audience engaging and the venue at the Ljubljana Castle fantastic. It's amazing what local communities can achieve so Kudos to the folks at Slovenia for organizing another successful OpenBlend.

2 comments:

adamo said...

"but also from bystanders outside the room and other helper staff who could hear it from the speakers."

Make it a podcast then.

Dimitris Andreadis said...

@adamo, if the video option doesn't work, I'll consider this option, thanks.