Friday, March 7, 2008

Roundup Roundup

WARNING: This blog entry was imported from my old blog on blogs.sun.com (which used different blogging software), so formatting and links may not be correct.



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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.


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