Javarsovia gets really seriously big

This year I attended for the first time the annual free (!) Java conference organized by couple of great folks from Warsaw. This conference – Javarsovia - more or less doubles (in terms of the number of participants) every year. This year it attracted about 650 people and I bet it could have gathered more, if the organizers had not suggested several days before the conferences on the web page that the registration is closed (and most of folks understood that there is no point in coming, whereas it meant: come at your own risk – there theoretically may be no place for you).

650 people makes Javarsovia one of the biggest Java conferences in Europe. And a lot of big players already noticed that: Google, Adobe, Oracle, Microsoft – all were sponsors this year. Thanks guys.

There were 4 parallel tracks. Each had six 45-minutes-long sessions. Drinks and lunch (very satisfiable) were served too. All free of charge.

So what I saw and learnt there. Honestly not much, but it was my own fault – please read why. But to the point:

First I listened to Jakub Nabrdalik who was talking about bio-degradation of your code. A very good speaker (although he claimed it was his first time – it was really really cool). Many people laughing and enjoying his style proved it. The content was also fine – more targeted toward less experienced programmers (coders). I would call it – line-level (or implementation level) code conservation.

I missed there more high level things like design consideration, architecture, but overall it was time well spent.

Next, I myself talked about agile contracts (basing on several we have had in last 2.5 years – including our wonderful relationship with Atlassian). About 300 people decided to listen to me. Wow! Thank you guys. Unfortunately I sucked. I was talking about how bad we are at estimation and I proved it myself. I overran the session by 8 or 10 minutes and still had several very important things to say. Shame on me.

And I was penalized immediately. Many people chased me down outside the main conference room and I have a prolonged discussion (or Q&A session) which lasted for about 1.5 hour.

Which means I missed the session I really wanted to participate in – Gil Tene talking about concurrent GCs. I almost missed my lunch. This is the price of talking for too long. I also wanted to hear Tomasz Kaczanowski talking about Gradle, but apparently I could not clone myself – it was colliding with my own presentation.

Then I rushed to hear Sławomir Sobótka and his take on Software Craftsmanship and the patterns. Slawek has been recently considered by many guys as one of the best speakers in Polish Java scene, so my appetite was very big. And that's why I felt somewhat disappointed. Slawek's talk was really good and informative, but I felt that he was quite dispirited and did not demonstrate such energy I had hope he would show. He talked about design patterns, how to apply them wisely and how they apply to software professionalism.

It's obvious that Uncle Bob inspires this year a lot of people with his craftsmanship quest. I somewhat predicted it after Devoxx 2009 Uncle's talk (awesome BTW – watch it guys).

My next stop was Tomasz Łabuz talking about AOP, JPA, ThreadLocal – very decent talk, but I did not learn there anything new. Although it was good to hear the first really technical talk with a lot of Java gore.

The last session I attended was the one where Jarosław Pałka talked about NoSQL. Unfortunately it was disappointing for me. I was late 10 minutes or so (talking too long with guys from Javart who happened to use Atlassian products and our Connector). As virtually whole talk I attended was about Neo4J, I initially though I had missed the rest, but then other people complained about it too.

SPOINA.

In the evening there was a free (thank you sponsor again) event where we could eat (traditional Polish fat food), drink (beer of course) and socialize – a lot.

This was probably the best part of the day – I met a few great guys and I could talk to them for hours.

As usually, such events are most for all about socializing, meeting new people, exchanging ideas and inspiring each other.

Javarsovia definitely met its goals then.

See you guys hopefully next year. Maybe till then our Polish railway won't suck any more so much (5.5 hours to get to Warsaw from Gdansk – the distance of 340 km).

But maybe not – as everything in Poland is to be ready only by Euro 2012 ;)

Atlassian Summit 2010 – random thoughts a few days after the conference

Although I am definitely heavily affiliated with Atlassian (as a contractor), here a few my random and maximum unbiased thoughts and observations from Atlassian Summit 2010 which took place last week in San Francisco and I was happy to be there.

Location, food and logistics

Location was great – very convenient place, close to many hotels (those expensive but also to those cheap), walking distance from BART and Market Street. Even for a person travelling from quite a distant place (more than 10 000 km in my case) getting to this place was quite fast. Intercontinental hotel itself was good (perhaps one of conference rooms could be bigger), food was awesome, WiFi somehow just worked (very rare thing at such events). Grand ballroom (also when reorganised into smaller rooms) was great. Audio/video was really good. And a lot of graphics (especially prepared by Atlassian folks, but not only) was just purely awesome. Very professional conference. Top class.

People

People were just awesome. No BS. This is definitely the biggest value of such conference. Atlassian is very special in this regard. It creates a tribe and attracts very special people to it – very friendly, intelligent, skilful, open minded, willing to share their knowledge and most of all genuinely passionate about what they do. This tribe (contrary to some other tribes – including the one following a black-and-white fruit ;) – which coincidently had their own gathering just in the neighbouring building) is very special – having fun from what they do is the most important thing for it, money comes second. Socialising with this people is just a pleasure. 550 people or so, with many of whom I chatted. No jerk detected. :)

Three evening events (well, if I midnight counts as evening) were great. One thing worth noting: there was a foosball table at Jillian's. Apparently 1+ year of practising 15 minutes a day makes a difference – the team I was on has won all the games. FTW!

And I finally realised this year that after all they have decent beer in SF.
BTW: did I already mention that folks from Minneapolis rock?

Launchpad

At the Summit several companies had a big announcements (new product releases or services). Most of 5-minutes-long presentation was really interesting. Attendees quickly judged them using live SMS voting (very cool idea although not free from people abroad on roaming). About 20 – 25% of people voted for each entry which was really good I think. The winner – Gliffy – proved that the show itself and how you present something is as important as the content. Good for them! Detailed list of entries is here.

Greenhopper

At the Summit GH 5.0 was announced. It looks really sleek: more readable, cleaner, more encouraging. Coloured stripes instead of coloured backgrounds is a great idea. I loved a new marker for release and iteration planning more visual and easier. Also new Kanban features look pretty amazing. Now we have to think how to integrate our Agile Scrum Cards plugin with this cool stuff (so that you can have on your physical post-it cards the same as you see on your screen).

GreenHopper itself has been the fastest growing Atlassian product. Since the acquisition announced last year its customer base has grown more than 10 times!

JIRA

Mike CB revealed current state of JIRA 4.2 (coming in 1 – 2 months timeframe) – which focuses mostly on UX for power users: a lot of keyboard shortucts, auto-completion, a lot of actions available directly from issue navigator (which becomes even more central place in JIRA). Everything to give us back 15 minutes a day with this feature. As an active JIRA Studio user, I hope that Studio will get this feature quickly too (which BTW was promised: shorter cycle time for Studio and smaller lag behind regular, behind-the-firewall, products).

Another thing which excited a lot of people where JIRA Wallboards, which by themselves are nothing technically new (just idea of gadget/portlets), but when polished (we all apparently follow Apple) and sold to the team/organisation as information radiators rather than fridges look fantastic. I wonder how many big LCD-s or plasmas will be now purchased thanks to Atlassian. LG, Sumsung or Sony should pay Atlassian a homage ;) JIRA Wallboards nicely play on “project transparency” (so important in agile projects) note too.

Probably the most exciting thing for JIRA admins (which I happen to be too) were 2 announcements:

• Universal Plugin Manager finally for JIRA (now available as a plugin, bundled soon). It will not only allow you to browse and install plugins directly from JIRA (again everyone follows AppStore ;), but what is the most fantastic: it will help you with planning and executing your upgrade – showing which plugins are incompatible with a new planned version.

• Bundling Atlassian Hercules with JIRA (and Confluence too), so that JIRA admins can be assisted quickly and warned about problems which have not yet surfaced.

Additionally Atlassian mentioned that in the future much focus will be set for improving in JIRA user & group management (including LDAP integration).

I got pretty excited about a new project with a code-name JIRAAnywhere: a JavaScript library allowing other web applications to easily connect to JIRA and make use of its information and capabilities: e.g. allowing to build nice hovers for hyperlinks leading to issues which not only show preview of the isssue, but also let you perform operations on them or even create a new issue from within different system. So cool and I expect soon a lot of products (Atlassian and 3^rd party) taking advantage of this lib. Having been deep into JIRA Integration and crying over it quite limited remote APIs, I hope that this project will also help drive new JIRA REST API so much wanted and long awaited by the community.

The last thing: JIRA and GetSatisfaction integration via just announced Customware plugin. The time for us to finally set on GetSatisfaction then?

Confluence

The browser technology (think poweful js and phasing out IE 6) finally allows for a relatively painless switch from wiki syntax (which obviously makes adoption of Confluence more difficult in non-purely-technical teams) to a fully fledged rich text editor (WYSIWYG). New Confluence will hopefully do just that. Provided that new editor is at least as good for power users as wiki syntax.

Many people call Confluence as “an awesome enterprise wiki”. How will we call it when there is no more wiki syntax in this wiki? ;)

Plugins

More than 1 million plugins were downloaded from plugins.atlassian.com within about 1 year since it has been released. It means every 30 second on average someone downloads a plugin. That's pretty impressive knowing that far majority of plugins are server side so that not for the end consumer (like iPhone apps). More than 500 plugins are published on plugins.atlassian.com and it's good to know that our team contributed around 1% of them :) Could be of course more, but knowing rapid growth of the ecosystem (c.a. 100% last year) it will be difficult to maintain this share.

Bamboo

Bamboo was surprisingly (for me at least) a hot topic. A lot of people asked difficult questions and seemed to use Bamboo as something far beyond just CI tool. It looks like it's becoming more a scheduling and automated task management tool (I saw also crazy integrations with JIRA via custom plugins) rather than a build system. Build chains coming in Bamboo 3.0 should definitely help in this area.

Other sessions

I attended mostly dev-oriented talks to stay in sync with the ecosystem (that's my role after all being the lead of Atlassian Connector for Eclipse project). I haven't learnt anything new significant there (but that's OK – I was there also to help others and listen to customers and partners, not just to learn). I was happy to hear Motorola's talk on how creatively they used Mylyn (thanks to its notion of the task context) + JIRA Connector (part of Atlassian Connector suite) + JIRA of course to establish a training/knowledge base for their developers. I believe though that even better results could be achieved with Crucible which additionally can serve the comments for highlighted code sections.

Anyway big congrats to Mik Karsten (the father of whole idea of the context) and whole Tasktop team working hard on Mylyn framework which we could build upon.

Craig Smith delivered an interesting presentation (although probably put too much content into one session) about Scrum, Kanban and process improvements (keizen) on agile teams using JIRA and GreenHopper.

I recommend reading a very good write-up from Craig Smith who describes in detail several talks.

It was promised that all talks will be published soon (video) on Atlassian website. Keeping my finger crossed. Otherwise I would have probably killed myself on deciding which session to visit.

Hopefully see you next year at Summit 2011.

P.S. Sorry: no pictures this time. I did not take my Nikon D90 with me and everyone knows that iPhone 3GS sucks wrt taking pictures unless it's very, very bright around.