Friday March 07, 2008

It's Friday morning and I've spent whole the week in beautiful Crested Butte in the Rocky Mountains, Colorado. Today is the last day of the Java Posse Roundup 2008, the second time we're hosting this open space conference. It has been a blast!

The format is 4 hours of open-space discussions every morning, then skiing in the afternoon, and then we have "lightning talks" in the evenings - 5 minute quick presentations that are short enough that the speaker is forced to be concise so the presentations are always interesting.

Last night we also passed around the microphone and recorded conference impressions. Dick has already mixed it and uploaded it as the latest episode - Episode 168. We've obviously recorded all the technical sessions as well and those will be posted to the normal Java Posse podcast feed over the next couple of months. I believe Joe and Dianne also recorded the lightning talks with a little video camera and those will be posted to our new YouTube channel.

Just like last year, a huge part of the success is due to the great set of participants. With so many different points of view and insights, every single session I've attended this week have been stimulating. While most of the participants came from the US, we even had 4-5 people attending from Europe! Stephan Janssen from the Belgian JUG has posted his pictures here - the following picture is his. Notice the amount of snow we had!

The following photo (by Matt Zimmer) is from one of the lightning talks:

Again notice the snow outside the windows. The lightning talks might be my favorite - 15-20 quick presentations back to back on subjects ranging from techy things like literate programming plugins for OpenOffice, Scala refactoring and JavaFX and Flex demos, Quantom Gravity and quantum cryptography, to Anime, to Stephan showing us the Java Polis artwork (which I've talked about before), and not just the ones that made it -- the ones that were rejected as well!

Some other coverage from O'Reilly's Chris Adamson here and here, Ido Green here and here, Joe Nuxoll, and Chris Maki.

Friday September 07, 2007

The "Java Posse Hello World Tour 2007" is about to kick off :-) Carl, Dick and I are heading to Norway next week for JavaZone, where we'll do a live session as well as hopefully get some great interviews and just have fun. I'm also doing a talk on Ruby Tooling.

Joe can't make it - he works on the web store at Apple, and apparently they're busy selling stuff! We're also going to JavaPolis in Belgium in December. I'm not sure if I'll be able to go yet, but the other three guys are confirmed.

If any of you will be at JavaZone next week, please say hi!

Here's our world tour poster, courtesy of Oliver Widder:

Saturday March 24, 2007

Here's a few photos from the Java Posse Roundup 2007.

Here's some of the posters we had on the wall - one for each day, segmented by the different rooms and timeslots. People could convene talks by writing a topic on a post-it; some of these would get shuffled around.

We had "Lightning Talks" in the evenings - a topic of your choice, limited to 5 minutes.

Here are some photos from the lightning talks.

Joel Neely is talking about the different algorithms used to spacing between letters in typography, using "Java Posse" as an example.

Here's Joe and Carl. At one point the powerstrip next to my feet had 8 identical Mac power adapters plugged into it...

In the afternoons, we'd go up to the world class skiing slopes in Crested Butte.

Finally, if you listened to episode 10x, you might be curious why Carl and Dick couldn't keep a straight face while listening to Joe - because they suddenly found a jackalope starting down at them:

Wednesday March 07, 2007

I've spent this week at the Java Posse Roundup 2007 in Crested Butte, Colorado. It's been just amazing. Obviously, the afternoon skiing has been fantastic, but more importantly, the conference itself exceeded all my expectations. It's an Unconference, which is quite different from normal conferences. I certainly had some scepticism that it would be productive, but boy was I wrong. Everyone else I have talked to have had similar experiences. Basically, everyone who showed up has had a lot to contribute, so in the various sessions I've learned a lot and it's been very stimulating and inspiring. We have recorded everything and will be releasing the audio over the next few months, so you can hear for yourselves. But obviously, being part of the conversation is a lot more engaging.

Anyway, it does mean that I've taken a brief pause from my Ruby IDE work. I promise I'll get back to it next week! I have however tracked down one bug - the bug with launched JRuby processes (webrick servers etc.) not getting killed and accumulating on your system. If you're not aware of this bug - check your process list occasionally, and kill orphan ones. Fix coming soon to an update center near you.

Saturday January 20, 2007

On Monday night we're going to record our 100th episode of the Java Posse. To mark the occasion we're going to do it live at Google's headquarters in Mountain View. If you're a listener please join us - Monday night at 6:15pm. More details in the shownotes for episode 99½ - here.

Also, we have the upcoming unconference in Colorado - the Java Posse Roundup 2007, March 6-9, co-hosted by Bruce Eckel. Sign up now, it's going to be a blast!

Tuesday December 05, 2006

We had a fun in-person recording session for the Java Posse last night over at Joe's house. This was hopefully the first of many to come, since Dick started working at Google yesterday, and is in the process of moving from Georgia to California. Since we're all swamped with work and life it was definitely an unprepared podcast, but we eventually got into some technical discussions. And we accumulated more clips for the outtakes reel.

Here's the crew, from right to left: Dick, Carl, Joe, me.

(Other sizes at Joe's flickr page).

Saturday May 20, 2006

We had a Java Posse live session at JavaOne. The room was packed and it was a blast. And I think the audience liked it too. We recorded it, so you can check out the audio here.

I just noticed that in O'Reilly's OnJava writeup, "JavaOne Day One" by Robert Cooper, he not only mentioned the event, but called it the highlight of the day! Thanks! He has a couple of pictures too. Check out the ridiculous hats! A really weird thing happened later that night at the pub. Somebody, nobody knew who, ran into the pub, grabbed the hat right off my hat and ran off! We never knew who took it. Hey, that was one quarter of the Java Posse's marketing budget :)

We've recorded many other interviews too, that will be posted gradually. Not only because it takes time to edit all that audio, but also such that we can be a bit lazy during the next few weeks, as we recover from JavaOne and all the preparations for it!