Transylvania JUG

Two weeks ago Janusz and I flew to Cluj-Napoca in Romania - the center of Transylvania.
We were invited to speak there at Java User Group. This event was co-sponsored by Atlassian, which generously paid for our trip (thank you Jon!).

Gabriel Pop was the organizer of JUG and our host there. A young and very enthusiastic guy and very passionate about Java, agile and growing JUG in the area. Thank you Gabi!

We did not want to do any pseudo-marketing bullshit there. Thus our presentations were strictly technical. Just the meat for software engineers.

On Wednesday the first day of JUG started and Janusz was talking about agile development processes using Atlassian tools (but the people and process, not tools, were the focal point). This topic attracted more than 60 people - it was the biggest Transylvania JUG ever! All of them stayed till the very end - almost 9 PM, despite of the most important event of this week - the match in European Champions League (real ;) football) between local team CRF Cluj Napoca and French Bordeaux.

People were mostly interested in how we at Atlassian cope with various problems related to agile software development. They have asked numerous questions and Q&A part took more than half an hour. Janusz received a great applause at the end of the session.

During the session we were asking several questions and gathering rough (hands-up) statistics :

• out of ca. 62 participants only 5 were students (JUG was held at a university)
• there were 16 women present! Wow, impossible in Poland :(
• about 30% uses agile development methods
• about 50% uses Eclipse as their IDE of choice, 20% Netbeans, 10% IDEA
• only 10% follows TDD principles

On Thursday I was giving more technical presentation split in two parts: Java technologies used by Atlassian and IoC in action (with Spring and PicoContainer in our products as examples).
I was trying to explain why some of technologies (and Open Source in general) are preferred by Atlassian. Then I moved to code samples showing various “dos” and “dont's” basing on our IntelliJ Connector (PicoContainer) and Crucible (Spring). Yeah, after 2 hours of talk I was quite exhausted.
I ended up the session with a short presentation of our Atlassian IntelliJ Connector. People were quite excited.

Romania did not disappoint me. It is somewhat different country than any other places I saw in Europe, but quickly catches up with the rest of European countries which ca. 20 years ago moved from communism epoch to democracy and capitalism.
Comparing it to Poland I would say they are just a few years behind (also they joined EU 3 years later than Poland), but they really determined and develop quickly. Only in Cluj itself, several western companies invested last year and created branch offices. One of such companies is Betfair who was hosting us.