OSCON 2011 - Mission Accomplished

OSCON 2011 - Mission Accomplished and a week of amazing learning and networking is finally coming to an end. I had flown in not only for OSCON Java but also for the Community Leadership Summit, that took place last Saturday and Sunday (but Sunday, I attended the JVM languages day instead, which was wonderful as well).

I was super-impressed with the variety of people from all over the planet, not only the US but also Europe and the Americas. E.g. if you saw somebody wrapped in a flag…that was Bruno Souza, the man that has put Brazil on the map for Java developers. Furthermore, all the cool open-source companies that you could ever think of were present as well. Just an awesome level of energy there.

Also, I was able to connect with a ton of VMware/SpringSource folks at the event that I hadn’t met personally before, yet. Just to give you an idea of how awesome the open-source community is: On Tuesday we went out for some great food at McMenamins Kennedy School. It is housed in an old school with everything left intact/restored (incl. the showers in the rest rooms). That place has 5 bars, restaurant and excellent outdoor seating.

Anyway, our group included Dan Allen from JBoss (member of the Seam, Weld and Arquillian projects), Peter Neubauer from Neo4J (Founder, good chance for me to speak some German ;-), William  Rowe from SpringSource (Apache Foundation Vice President, HTTP Server), David Blevins from IBM (Co-founder of Geronimo and OpenEJB), Mark Johnson from SpringSource  (President of NEJUG),  Bruce Snyder from SpringSource (ActiveMQ comitter), Josh Long from SpringSource (Developer advocate and author), Steve Mayzak from SpringSource (Author). Seriously, to me, this was like being backstage! Thanks for having the chance to meet you all!

Back to OSCON here are the sessions I was able to attend:

Monday

• Theory of Caching (Greg Luck)
• Java Puzzlers – Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel (Josh Bloch, Bob Lee)
• The Ghost in the VM: A Reference to References (Bob Lee)

Tuesday

• Everything You Wanted to Know about Open Source that Nobody Told You (Jeff Genender)
• Managing Thousands of Cloud Instances with Java (Patrick Lightbody)
• ActiveMQ in Action – Common Problems and Solutions (Bruce Snyder)
• The Evolution of Java: Past, Present, and Future (Josh Bloch)
• From Ruby on Rails to Java: The Gory Details (Steve Jenson) 
• A Giant Hop Forward with Spring Roo (Steve Mayzak and Josh Long