Published on 12 Dec 2018
I've been to Sofia, Bulgaria, a couple of times already. It all started with the Java2Days organizers inviting the Payara team to give a talk 2 years ago. But this time it was something special. The organizers joined forces with other IT conferences and prepared a special edition for its 10th anniversary in what is probably the largest building in Bulgaria - the National Palace of Culture.
The conference was held for 3 days, making it one of the biggest and longest Java conferences in Europe this year. With a lot of sessions, hands-on labs and community activities, attendees had various options for how to spend their time, learn cool stuff, exchange experiences and even hack on their laptops. The organizers did a great job keeping everyone busy and comfortable at the same time and they deserve a lot of respect for that.
From the very beginning, it was evident that this conference was unique also in the topics covered. If you wanted to learn about Jakarta EE and MicroProfile, this was one of the most useful events to attend this year. It all started with Reza Rahman, a long time Java EE advocate, giving an overview of MicroProfile during his keynote. Afterward, during all 3 days of the conference, attendees could attend a lot of sessions touching on Jakarta EE and MicroProfile from different perspectives. MicroProfile and CDI hands-on labs allowed for going even deeper and practice.
And the highlight of the conference was the Jakarta EE panel, joined by representatives of several Jakarta EE vendors and Eclipse Foundation members to share their information and future visions from various perspectives.
I arrived at the conference during the first day, so I missed the beginning. But I couldn't miss the awards ceremony in the evening. Although the ceremony was mostly in Bulgarian which I couldn't understand, it was worth to be there. It was opened with an amazing lighting show and the show went on with Reza Rahman on the stage in traditional Bulgarian clothes. Cute :) But then Reza astonished everybody when began his speech in fluent Bulgarian! One could guess that Reza has a place in heart for Java2Days, as he's one of the speakers that attended the first edition 10 years ago and has come back a couple of times since then.
On the second day, I gave my first talk on how to develop an agile evolutionary architecture with open source tools to build elastic and cloud-ready applications.
The talk was recorded and I hope the recording will be available soon. Meanwhile, here are the slides from that talk:
In the afternoon, I attended the Jakarta EE panel. I really felt in a good company, with Reza Rahman moderating, and Werner Keil, Dmitry Kornilov, Emily Jiang, and Otávio Santana with me on the stage:
The slides from the Jakarta EE panel are here:
On the 3rd day, I gave a talk about reactive features in MicroProfile. It was the same talk I gave at Devoxx a few weeks earlier, only this time improved with better explanations and examples of the future MicroProfile API and nice marble diagrams in the documentation like the following one:
Here are the slides from that talk:
I felt very comfortable at Java2Days this year. I met a lot of new people and also long-time friends. Sometimes people remembered me from my previous visits to Sofia. I even had an interesting discussion about reactive programming with an attendee of my talk at the JPrime conference in Sofia earlier this year. All in all, I had a great time in Sofia again and I'm sure it's not for the last time!