Devoxx08 - day 2

Today was my big day with my two presentations and the quickie session.

But first I started off with some real good coffee at my very nice hotel :) When I arrived at Devoxx, the exhibition floor was already crowded with people enjoying breakfast there and playing table soccer at the JBoss booth.

People at breakfast

I went to the "Java Performance Tooling" presentation by Kirk Pepperdine and Holly Cumminns. They really approached the topic in a funny and very knowledgeable way. Key point to successful performance tooling is to use the right methodology. The two were showing and explaining this with lots of fun, examples and demos.

If you have the chance to get the video after the conference, make sure to take the time to watch is and learn from it (there are a few spots, where you can press fast forward :). But I have definitively learned from this session.

Next for me after this talk was Quickie "I spy something ... and it's a bug". When I came into the room, the person doing the previous quickie talk had not even started due to technical issues, so I was only able to start at the time I was supposed to finish. Luckily there was time left after my presentation, so I went through the slides a little quicker - the actual code demo was exactly right. I got some good applause and also some feedback about the issues presented from the audience. One of the feedbacks was that I'd probably enjoy the "Java Puzzlers" book - will check it out.

I took some of the time until my next talk to prepare for it - the conference network is sub-obtimal and relying on it being present is no good idea for a talk.

My other two talks went well as well. The RHQ one attracted around 50 people and the Profiler one around 300. I got good and positive feedback for both and was actually talking to some folks about Jopr and RHQ later on and showing them more at our booth. I hope that there will be more questions to come.

Here are some more pictures from the exposition floor:

There are actually a lot of photos online at http://www.flickr.com/groups/devoxx08


Luckily I got rewarded for all the pain and hassle :-) by the speakers dinner in the Pakhuis brewery....