Devoxx: The story so far
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.
- Really great to meet up with some of the people I met at Java One and am starting to feel more a part of the global community.
- Seems to me there are slightly more women here than at the other conferences I’ve been to, and not just because Regina and I pulled together four women for a panel on women technologists. And once again, a lot of guys asking why this is, because they want things to change.
- A highlight was seeing my namesake, AutoTrish, up on a cinema-sized screen in front of hundreds of people at Dave Farley’s Continuous Delivery presentation.
- Building on from my twitter revelation at JAX London, I’ve found twitter very useful here for messaging people I want to meet up with, but also for chatting to new people and making new friends. It’s not quite as intimate as JAX London though because there are billions more people here, so the chances of actually bumping into the twitter friends is much lower.
- Have had lots of interesting conversations with people about the Open JDK, which I guess is the logical extension of the interesting conversations I had about the JCP In San Francisco.
- A community event like this is different to an event like Java One, because a single organisation isn’t calling the shots. It’s interesting (and great) that Oracle and Google can both be here talking about the cool stuff they’re up to.
The Diabolical Developer
Conferences are clearly something that appeal to me - I love meeting people and chatting about interesting and (sometimes) intelligent things; I love learning stuff and indexing it away, possibly for future references; I love hanging out with people like the LJC guys (Ben, Martijn and John); I love kicking around ideas of what more we can do at LMAX with our lot (Mike, Dave, Dali).
Dave’s Continuous Delivery
I’m really looking forward to my panel this afternoon, I’m going to be ranting about how we target women for tech jobs. Should be fun.