In previous years, JAX London would have been an easy, local conference to go to. This time it took me most of Sunday to get there, and not because of the Super Storm. Still, that gave me the day to finish off the tutorial I was running there on Monday morning. Not that I would be so unprofessional as to leave preparing things until the last minute, oh no….

Saturday I had the pleasure of being part of the 5th London Java Community Open Conference. This is a great event to end the conference season on - it made me feel good about being part of the LJC, and got me excited about the prospects for 2013. The fantastic thing about an open conference is that a) you don’t have to prepare like mad for it and b) the short sessions and wide variety of subjects mean that you learn stuff you didn’t expect to.

On the same day Stephen Chin came to see me at the 10gen offices, we also ran a NightHacking session in the evening with the London Java Community. Not many people turned up (maybe I need to work on my signage to the office?) but it was a great session. In fact, having less people meant we could all be involved.

Seemed like a quiet conference this year. Not really sure why, maybe it was the layout of the massive (and extremely dark) main room; maybe it was the awkward L-shape of the communal space; or maybe this year people were more interested in listening to the (really very good) sessions rather than participating or meeting other people. Whatever the reason, it felt quiet and almost low-key.

Performance seemed pretty high on the agenda, as you’d expect from a London conference, with a number of things on offer:

Well this is exciting! JavaOne 2011 is the first conference I spoke at, so this the first time I’ve covered the same conference two years running. I think. It’s very nice to be back at JavaOne. Last year it was my first opportunity to meet so many people - the guys at Oracle who work really hard to make sure Java has its own identity; the JUG Leaders and Duchess folk; the JCP EC committee members; and loads of people who live and work in the area who I wouldn’t normally get a chance to speak to in person.

I was interviewed at GOTO Copenhagen, about Java, the Disruptor, the Graduate Developer Community & London Java Community, and a whole host of other things.  So to make up for the lack of blogging this month, here it is:

Topping off my mini-tour at the end of May, I was invited to Rotterdam to present to a brand new community of developers. I was really interested in attending because my experience with user groups is pretty much limited to the London Java Community, and I knew this would be different due to being a) across a wider range of technologies and b) shiny and new.

A few weeks ago, I presented my new “User’s Guide to the Disruptor” talk to the London Java Community. Since it was very kindly hosted at Skillsmatter, there is a video of the presentation available, and the slides are below.

Saturday was, hopefully, my last conference of the year. My lucky readers should start to see some posts which are not simply me gushing about another opportunity to hang out with awesome people and learn about interesting “stuff”.

Stephan wearing the Brazilian flag at the opening keynote European conferences are different (and cool) because you get to hear even more languages spoken than you usually do in London (apparently the most diverse city in the world for spoken languages). I think the idea of a Paris Devoxx with 75% of the talks in French is brilliant - I’m always banging on about diversity, we shouldn’t expect developers to learn in English only.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at JAX London along with a number of the London Java Community regulars (Martijn/Ben/John/Sandro/Simon/Zoe I’m looking at you….)

My purpose for attending was largely to present the Hardcore Concurrency for Beginners talk that Mike and I debuted at an LJC event a few weeks back. Almost as important was catching up with the aforementioned LJCers and meeting with as many people as would talk to me. After the disappointment of the sessions at Java One, sitting in a room being talked at was quite low down on my list of priorities. Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong.

Last Tuesday Mike and I unveiled our brand shiny new presentation: Understanding the Disruptor, a Beginner’s Guide to Hardcore Concurrency. This was a preview of the talk we’ll be doing at JAX London on the 2nd November. A video of the session is available, as are the slides. I promise not to say “so” anywhere near as many times when I repeat my performance at JAX (is there anything more painful than watching yourself on video?

Having been back in London for a few days I’ve had some time to digest the madness that was last week.

My lasting impression of JavaOne is almost entirely positive. Granted, it was my first major conference, so maybe I’m just not jaded yet. But let me tell you what I loved about it (yes, I did cover some of these in my last post):

So, I’m off to JavaOne next week! This is an unexpected and very pleasant surprise. I’ll be there with Martin (of the Disruptor fame), and Martijn (that’s not going to get confusing at all). Martin will be talking about the Disruptor on Thursday, and Martijn is busy talking about… everything. Most importantly for the LJC he’s representing us in our shiny new JCP Executive Committee role. I’m really looking forward to meeting pretty much anyone and everyone who’ll talk to me.

Remember a while back I talked about my first public appearance? Well, I chased down the video, because I’m masochistic, and here it is for you all to enjoy. Pleasingly my mannerisms are slightly less of a camp man trapped in a woman’s body, which was my impression the last time I saw myself presenting. It helps that YouTube has made the video so dark you can’t see me.

I nominated LMAX for a couple of JAX Innovation Awards, but unfortunately we did not get shortlisted :( However, the London Java Community did! So if you have a second please vote for the LJC for Top Java Ambassador

I’m finally moving up from working behind the scenes to actually doing a (short) presentation for the LJC. I’m going to be giving a lightning talk on Wednesday at the AWS Elastic Beanstalk event, on the JCP - what it is and what our election to the executive committee means. Ben and Martin’s post gives a little more background on the subject. Another LMAX LJC member Mike will also be giving a lightning talk, on Project Coin.

I’m honoured to now be listed on three aggregated blog feeds: The new and somewhat embryonic blogs.lmax.com. The London Java Community Aggrity. ThoughtWorks Alumni, along with a whole host of distinguished names. The pressure’s on to try and write useful stuff. Oh OK, I’ll settle for “entertaining”.

As an associate member of the London Java Community (LJC), I’m very pleased with the news that we won an Open seat on the Java SE/EE executive committee. The results show that we got an astonishing 47.5% of the vote - if an MP got voted in with that percentage the newspapers would probably be using the word “landslide”. It’s quite exciting to be one of the two user groups involved.