Jakub Korab

I am in Australia at the moment, hanging out, enjoying the weather, kite surfing and the company of friends. Due to messing up my dates with travel and such, I’ll be at the Sun Tech Days in Melbourne tomorrow and in Sydney on Wednesday and Thursday. It’ll be interesting to see what the Sun folks have lined up as far as event go, and how it compared to my experience of the IJTC event that we ran in Dublin last year. If you’re at either of those and see a really mellow looking bloke in shorts, that’d be me. Stay tuned for event photos.

Holy cow. We did it!

Three months ago a couple of guys in a bar were talking about how cool it would be to do a Java conference in Dublin. Many sleepless nights and countless emails later, 350 people attended the inaugural IJTC! The response was overwhelming. We had a world class lineup, the logistics ran like clockwork, the speakers and delegates had a great time. Awesome!

The thing that I got from it, was that it doesn’t matter whether you run a JUG, contribute to open source, blog or whatever. Just participate. Start something. Engage in community.

Next year, bigger, better, and even more fun.

Photos coming soon. Now I’m off to show the guys around Dublin.

Yesterday’s event worked out really well. We had about 100 people in the theater take part in opening evening. My welcome speech was nothing to be worried about - I forgot half of what I was going to say, but that’s OK - it just gives me some opening words this morning.

Joel’s keynote presentation on how to build blue ribbon products was great fun and really informative. I have never seen PowerPoint used like that - hats must go off. Apparently there was some stress in getting him to the airport, I’ll have to get the full story today.

The panel discussion was very insightful. Covering everything from the impact of the new OSX distribution not upgrading its JVM to the JSR standards versus open source innovation, the future it seems is anything but clear. To know what to recommend, learn and implement will always be a matter of personal judgment and experience. The only way to keep up, is to engage and be aware of the landscape of competing products in the landscape. It’s one of the huge challenges of a career in IT, and one that should be enjoyed and embraced.

The first day of presentations kicks off in an hour and a half. I have to have a quick shower and get out to Cineworld. We are starting right on the dot today, but it will be a challenge getting everybody in to the first session by 9:15 - the Irish tendency for being casual with time really test your nerves. It’s not a party guys, fashionably late doesn’t work here. Lol \o/

I am about to head off to the IJTC. It’s an incredible feeling to know that we have managed to put together a conference in only 3 months! We are expecting well over 200 delegates this evening, and even though I am MCing the event this evening, I am not in the least bit nervous. Tonight represent the climax of a hugely busy period in the lives of all of us organizers, and there is nothing for it but to go for it, let the chips fall where they may and have an awesome time.

See you there!

I am ecstatic to announce that Joel Spolsky, of Joel on Software fame, has officially confirmed to open the IJTC in Dublin next week with a keynote address. For those who do not know Joel, he is a programmer, entrepreneur, blogger and writer of what I would consider one of the essential books on software engineering practice.

“Joel on Software” is one of those books that rounds out a computer science education with a day to day survival guide to real life programming projects. I would rate it as one of the must-reads that include “The Pragmatic Programmer”, “Death March” and “The Mythical Man Month”. Joel is a very entertaining speaker, and will really set the mood for what has turned out to be a conference line-up that any Java event would be proud of.

The Irish Java Technology Conference runs from the 7th-9th of November at the CineWorld Cinemas in Dublin. Registration for the event is open at http://ijtc.firstport.ie.

Just received word this evening that another couple of big speakers have confirmed for the Irish Java Technologies Conference. It is a fantastic feeling when everything come together and falls into place

We are going to be put on a fantastic conference programme here in Dublin and I think people are going to be wondering why this hasn’t been done before. It has been great to get the support of the big tech companies like Sun, Microsoft, Oracle, Iona and AOL and it is a great opportunity for the smaller consultancies to present their expertise. Speaker bios are being updated as they come in.

It is worth mentioning that Dublin JUG members receive a discount to attend the conference. To save a few quid:

1. Log on to dubjug.org, if you don’t have an account it’s easy to sign up. What better reason to join your local JUG?
2. Go to the registration discount page and follow the link. It’s that simple.

Having formally started inviting individual speakers for the ITJC last week we have been absolutely amazed at the response. What seemed as one of the major challenges for us upfront, has really turned out to be a nice surprise! The response has been fantastic and our speaker slots are filling up quickly, with presentations on enterprise frameworks, IDEs and tools. The speaker list will be posted up on the conference site once we start getting the topics and speaker bios finalized, at which point the marketing machine will really kick in from an attendees perspective.

Luan O’Carroll and I went out to the Cineworld Cinemas last night during the Microsoft Silverlight presentation, to take a look at the facilities from a conference standpoint, and it has really been a fantastic experience. The venue is great and I just know that we are going to put on a great event there. Nothing helps to get things in perspective like a 400 seat auditorium with cup holders on every seat The venue is outstanding in that we can upgrade our facilities as the days require, switching cinemas to handle the popularity of each presentation.

Sometimes I have to pinch myself. What seemed like a pie in the sky project for the Dublin JUG a couple of months back when we started talking about it, is really coming in to fruition - thanks in no small part to the IrishDev.com guys who have been great at every step in the process, working tirelessly to get the logistics of the operation in place.

To quote a famous beer ad. “This is gonna be great!”

Coinciding with our work on the IJTC conference, scheduled for early November, the Dublin JUG will soon be moving off Meetup. This is in order to provide a more complete service to our group members, such as blog rolls, wiki, conference content and group planning. New logo, site, content… An exciting and busy time. Watch this space.

In early November, the Dublin Java Users Group along with IrishDev will be hosting the first of what I hope will be many major Java events here in Dublin. The one day Irish Java Technologies Conference aims to deliver the same caliber of content as the larger Java conferences, with an Irish slant, right to our doorstep here in Dublin.

We are currently putting out a call for speakers, so if you are interested in hearing any particular speakers, or talks covering specific topics or technologies related to the Java platform, email myself “jakub _ korab at yahoo dot com dot au” or “info at irishdev dot com”.