Rozdoum team at JEEConf 2016: Why this conference is worth visiting?

Java Team at Rozdoum

Previously we said that at Rozdoum we make it common practice to highlight the personal growth of every team member in order to maintain a strong foundation of the Rozdoum development house. And today we would like to prove that we mean what we say…Previously we shared some secrets about how the Rozdoum team could maintain such a high level of professionalism. We said that at Rozdoum we make it common practice to highlight the personal growth of every team member in order to maintain a strong foundation of the Rozdoum development house. And today we would like to prove that we mean what we say.
Our team of Rozdoum Java experts took part in the biggest Java conference in Eastern Europe – JEEConf, which was held last weekend in Kyiv, Ukraine. We decided to ask them to share their thoughts and impressions.

1. Did the conference meet your expectations?

Michael: It even outperformed my expectations! Lots of different amenities confirm the qualification of the organizers even more so than the topics of the speakers.

Nazar: Of course it did. With all the tracks and organizations that participated in the conference, it was impossible to return unsatisfied.

Vlad: Essentially yes. But I see some points to be improved there.

2. Organizers claimed: “It’s the largest Java conference in Eastern Europe” What can you say about JEEConf organization?

Michael: Oh, as expected, it was really crowded. I was able to meet with some of my friends from Dnipropetrovsk, Vinnitsa and Odessa. Although 1000 is not a big number, the conference venue itself was enormous. It occupied a couple of floors and I often felt lost in such huge crowds.

Nazar: Yes, the conference was quite interesting. I would expect no less from such a global event like JEEConf. The organizers did a really great job and everything was of the highest level. Tracks were really exciting (unfortunately we weren’t able to visit several at the same time and were left with having to choose just one), the food was delicious, and the venue was large and comfortable. I am satisfied with what they did and I’m proud to be a part of such an amazing global event.

Vlad: I guess I need to visit some other conferences in Eastern Europe to have something to compare it to. I can compare this event only with other conferences in Ukraine (like JavaDay and AgileEE). However, it was a great event with a lot of attendees, speakers and tasty cookies of course. The organizers did a good job.

3. What is your impression of the conference? Maybe, you can tell us about some unique details, which you could see only at JEEConf.

Michael: I was really looking forward to listening to the speakers from other countries and there were a lot of them. I got an impression that I was a part of a big powerful organism which was spread all over the world. We have never seen each other before, but Java united us and we were able to speak to each other for hours. So to me, it felt like it was some kind of reunion party.

Nazar: I had never been at such a large conference as JEEConf. When we arrived at the venue and saw it for the first time, we were really excited about the size and the content of the event. “WOW…” – I think this was the exact feeling that I had when entering the venue. Regarding the unique details of JEEConf it’s quite obvious, the people. In everyday life, you’ll never meet so many talented developers in a single place, ready to share their knowledge with you and answer every one of your questions.

Vlad: There was, of course, a lot of schwag that vendors gave away. It turned out that the bag that I received at the beginning of the conference was even too small to fit everything that I accumulated throughout the conference.

4. Please, describe the most entertaining moment at the conference.

Michael: “Java 8 Puzzlers” will be in my memories forever! There was so much new useful information, but we were laughing during the whole talk over some weird features of the technology that at one time we considered it to be easy and thus only briefly studied it.

Nazar: When it comes to entertaining moments, the best ones were during the breaks. On the second floor there were plenty of IT companies (partners) which had a ton of interesting things and challenging tasks with prizes. There was a Java quiz from Luxoft and Playtika, exciting quest from EPAM, cool logical constructs from GlobalLogic as well as a few other companies, which were entertaining for the participants.

Vlad: It was the moment before announcing the winner of Quadcopter drone.

5. What do you think about the possibility of participating in such an event as a speaker? Is this a role for you?

Michael: Unfortunately, my level of expertise is not high enough to be on the same list with the rest of the speakers. I hope I will achieve it someday.

Nazar: To tell you the truth, I was already invited to be a guest speaker for a local conference some time ago, but I didn’t take it seriously mostly because I don’t feel comfortable speaking in front of so many developers. Someday, when I feel confident enough, I think it’d be worth trying.

Vlad: I am not good at public speaking. My personal communication skills prevent me from doing such things.

6. Could you tell us about the talks that you visited at JEEConf and if they were informative or not? Which presentations were the most useful for you?

Michael: The quality of the talks definitely depends on the speaker’s personality. Some talks which were supposed to be bright were spoiled by passive speakers. For instance, “Implement your own profile with blackjack and fun”, “Hotspot & AOT”, “ORM is an Offensive Anti-Pattern” were in my personal plan from the very beginning of the conference but brought only disappointment. On the other hand, regular topics were filled with energy and enthusiasm of the speakers. I was chasing Nicolai Parlog around for half of the first day of the conference. That’s how inspiring his talk was. I regret that I missed another one of his talk about Jigsaw. Also, Alexander Matorin discovered some new tastes of the old generics, and Christoph Engelbert told me about interesting features of the upcoming new release of Java platform. The best talk was definitely done by Attila Szegedi regarding the sense of life, work and bitcoins mining.

Nazar: The level of expertise was pretty high, but as for the speech, it mostly depends on the speaker. There were some interesting topics with a lot of valuable information, but the way they were presented to the audience was too boring and a few times I just left the speeches which had just started and took part in the other ones which were already taking place. This underscores the fact that you may be skilled enough to perform a techtalk, but if your public speaking skills are weak then your audience is doomed to be bored till the end of the presentation.

I have no doubts in choosing the most useful speech for me. This was Hibernate performance tuning by Mikalai Alimenkou and Igor Dmitriev. The information and the way it was presented was just brilliant.

Vlad: Unfortunately, even at big and well-organized conferences, there are some boring talks and speakers. I was totally disappointed of some talks about performance testing and cloud-native Java EE. However, there were some speakers who really made the conference worth attending!

I want to thank Nicolai Parlog (Disy Informationssysteme GmbH, Germany), Attila Szegedi (FaunaDB, Hungary) and Christoph Engelbert (Hazelcast, Germany) for doing such a good job!

Conclusion

So, as you see, our Rozdoum experts have different points of view on the same questions. They talked about their favorite moments, presentations and overall impressions which were sufficiently different.
Although they had different perspectives on many aspects of the conference, they did share one common view and that was how wonderful the experience was for them and how beneficial it is for the Rozdoum team as a whole.