W-JAX in Munich. This conference took place from the 7th to 9th of November 2011 and was all about Java, web technologies and agility. The W-JAX is with 1,200 attendees one of the biggest developer conferences in Germany.
You couldn’t make to W-JAX this year? Here is what you’ve missed:
- Meet the experts
You missed your chance to discuss hot technologies directly with the experts after the talks or on Tuesday evening at the Ballroom Event. The organizers had set up tables with specific topics like “Mobile Development”, “Java Enterprise” or “Performance”. At every table was sitting an or more experts of this specific topic. The attendees could than go to each table, ask questions and join into the discussion. - Networking
You missed the chance to broaden your network. Actually, that is what I think conferences are about. Speaking to people and getting ideas how to fix problems from other developers who has been down that road already or just get a new angle to your day to day work. - The latest trends in software development
You missed to hear the newest topics from Europe’s best experts on Cloud, Java, Continuous Delivery, Agility and Web Technologies. One highlight was definitely Kevlin Henney’s keynote about Cool Code. Kevlin was showing how to fit the code of a chess program into just 4.8 SMS and how to write a web server in just one line of code. The point was, that programmers should start studying code by reading more of it. There is so much free and cool code out there.
A big trend of this years W-JAX was the DevOps movement. Matthias Marshall talked in his keynote about improving the team collaboration between the operational staff and the developers. He encouraged the listeners to show more interest for each other and exchange problems and ideas. - The great atmosphere
You missed the free beer reception, the delicious food, the original Bavarian brezl and the hallway conversations. And of course you missed Munich. Atlassian has of course visited the Hofbräuhaus and tried some Maß of German beer (one liter beer in a mug) and someWeißwürste (special Bavarian sausages). You can imagine that this was a long night. - Cool Atlassian Swag
You missed the chance to make your team mates jeleous and come to work after W-JAX with an awesome Angry Nerds Shirt. We brought 150 Shirts with us and ran out of them after 1 day. Additionally you missed the opportunity to get an unique AtlassianNovemberfest beer glass. These were exclusively produced for W-JAX.
Of course you also missed 2 great talks of Atlassian staff: John Stevenson gave a presentation on Clojure, a new functional programming language that runs on the JVM and I talked about how to clean up old code bases to keep your legacy code alive and kicking. The slides from my talk are available here.
You see, you missed very cool and important stuff. So catch Atlassian on the next big event to talk to us about newest trends in agile development, new features in JIRA or the latest soccer results of Bayern München. You can find a list of conferences we or our partners attending here.
Sven Peters 