If I should pick one conference that has been instrumental in defining my career, it would be JavaOne. I have attended almost all editions of JavaOne since my first time in 1999 including the years it was branded as CodeOne. First as an attendee, later as a speaker. What makes JavaOne special is the quality of the technical content and of course the Community. JavaOne is the plays to meet the Java Community. JavaOne 2026 was the second JavaOne since the restart back in the Bay Area. It is now a smaller more boutique-like conference far from what it used to be in its hay-days in the beginning of the Millennium.
I didn’t have a regular talk at this year’s JavaOne and my intention was to go there and enjoy as an attendee. But then the opportunity to host a mentoring session in the Mentoring Hub came up. Since I have done mentoring sessions at the Mentoring Hubs at Jfokus and Devnexus earlier this year, signing up for this was a no-brainer.
I had a session about how to Get Started with Open Source. This is a topic near to my heart. It is also a topic a lot of interested people wonder about.
The Mentorship Hub is the best place to meet new community members, so I ended up hanging around that area most of the time between the sessions I listened to.
JavaOne for me is mostly about the hallway track. And the hallway track this year was just as good as last year. There is no place on the planet where you can bump into so many luminaries in the Java Community.
On Friday, the day after the conference, we had one of our two yearly face-to-face meetings in the Java Community Executive Committee.We had a lot of great presentations about what the different members are doing with and for the community. Since the meeting was held at the Oracle campus, it was a natural choice to take the group photo and some selfies in front of the Oracle sponsored Team USA America’s Cup boat outside one of the office buildings.
