JavaOne

I've been having fun in JavaOne. I have gone around, talked to a lot of interesting people, listened to some good talks (although most were, in the end, quite useless), and got to remember a little of San Francisco (well, last time I was here was about 14 years ago!). The only bad thing so far is that I just couldn't find any good candidates (that was one of my primary objectives here). It's not that there are no good people around, but every potentially good person I talked to, either lives and works in another country or likes their jobs and didn't really find interesting what I had to offer (they were impressed, but not really their area of interest).

Anyway, I still have an evening and two days ahead of me to keep meeting people. I think I already gave out about 20 business cards (but no flashlights - didn't quite fit any of the conversations). As strange as it might seem, they gave us a whole 2h30min of break between the last afternoon session and the evening session. Bad thing is that I'm not hungry at all! Oh, and the evening sessions go all the way to 11:30 pm.

The conference model is very interesting. They have a keynote speaker in the morning and then 1 hours sessions throughout the day (about 6-10 happening at the same time). In the evening they have what they call the Birds-of-Feather sessions that are more informal and focus on specific experiences. Yesterday I went to two of them and they weren't that great.

My general experience so far is that POJO is the keyword (Plain Old Java Objects). And XML sadly is becoming the middleware of choice for everything. Web services is what everybody is betting on. 1 second delay parsing and processing XML is just considered "negligible time" (I heard people saying this today but on the context of Spring object initialization). It is scary where the thecnology is getting, but exciting at the same time.

Ok, done with my technical rant. Time to decide what else I can do without having internet access on my work laptop and not being hungry at all.