This was my second time as a speaker at DeveloperWeek. This time it was located in San Jose, California. It is still a fairly well attended event, but it felt a little smaller this time than when I attended three years ago. The focus is a bit different than the usual conferences I attend and speak at. I don’t think I have had to explain what Eclipse Foundation is and does as often at any conference before.
I presented The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java on the first day of the conference. As the main conference started on Thursday, this was practically a day-zero event with separate passes and potentially a different audience.
The talks on the first day are called workshops, but are really regular 50-minutes long technical sessions. For the rest of the conference, the session length is 25 minutes, so in that regard speaking on this day is better. It is really hard to give a good technical talk in 25 minutes. The downside is that there is a little fewer attendees on this day than on the first conference day. But still a decent outcome.
My talk went well, all demos worked, and I got some good questions and chats afterwards.
On Friday, I was part of a panel regarding “Low cost, big impact marketing”. The panel was moderated by Stephen Chin from Neo4j. All the panelists had roles within developer relations, or developer marketing if you like.
We talked about the importance of being present at conferences, where the developers are, the importance of the hallway track.
Another topic we discussed where how to nurture and scale the community around the product/project/technology we are advocating for.
An interesting touch by Steve at the end was to do the Q&A on the floor among the attendees and not on the stage. That way everyone can ask their question to the panelist they wanted rather than having to listen to all panelists responding to someone else’s question.
The best part of attending a conference is meeting and catching up with old and new friends. The hallway track…
