After the game is for the game .... from Sun Tech Days to JavaPolis

From Monday until today I was in Frankfurt joining the Sun Tech Days. ... and I was impressed about the effort Sun did afford. Almost 1000 attendees visited three days full of high quality technical sessions and hands-on labs in the Messe area of Frankfurt. There have been some booths, a java.net community corner like at J1 (I inspired) and a very good catering with soft drinks, wine, beer, glühwein, currywurst, cake ...

The man on duty in the opening speech was Reggie Hutcherson, the manager of the Sun Technology Evangelism group. He introduced into the conference. During his opener he borrowed a joke: he told about a guy in a bar the night before who asked an english Java evangelist in which group England is playing next year in the football European championships...the guy in the bar was me and the English evangelist was Simon Ritter. Not only Simon but about ten other evangelists, marketing and technical Sun employees I did meet in the bar drinking some beer and chatting about this and that. It was a nice evening ... but I think the last beer was stale: the day after I was a bit sick.

Nevertheless I visited many sessions and had many, many talks. One hotspot was a dinner meeting with James Gosling on Tuesday where several Java Champions and JUG leaders had the opportunity for an intimate talk with the Java godfather himself.

Tuesday evening about 20 persons (JUG leaders, Java enthusiasts, Java campus ambassadors) went out for some Bembel Apfelwein in a typical Frankfurt Apfelwein-Bar. Very nice ...

On Wednesday Dr. Heinz Kabutz had a talk about Java concurrency. Heinz wrote the prolog for my book as you remember. ... oh yes, and NetBeans 6 was released on the days.

The Tech Days were good and I thank Sun Microsystems for inviting me. From a community/developer view it would be even better do have some more attendees involvement. The Tech Days now were mainly driven by Sun and Sun speakers (do you know Sang Shin? he is cool). The involvement could have the form of an unconference where attendees more drive the content or at least some popular speakers enrich the programm.

So let's relax a bit in Cologne, do some IT work and refuel tanks ... next week is the next Java highlight: the JavaPolis 2007. JavaPolis is the biggest Java conference in Europe and in my opinion the best. I will be in Antwerp from Tuesday to Friday and hope to see you there. I will be e.g. at the JUG BOF, the Java Champions BOF ... the speakers dinner on Tuesday evening. Look for a big german hat to identify me. :-)