JavaDay 2014 a leap forward
Java Day is an event that jug.mk organizes for the past 5 years. From the small group of enthusiastic presenters in EU-info center in Skopje to a full 7h filled with lectures at a cinema hall JavaDay has grown to be one of the leading technical events in the area.
What has changed over the years and what the future holds
We started out as a small event with only local speakers in 2009 happening each year since then. In 2013, we had 1 person outside of Macedonia. The need for diversity was becoming more apparent. 2014 was the year we went fully international with 6 speakers coming from Switzerland, Serbia, and Bulgaria. We had participants in the audience from all the neighboring countries.The Bulgarian JUG presence was a great addition and an awesome connection between our JUGS.
The keynote
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Corsin Decurtins, CTO of Netcetera gave an awesome talk on "how to become a great developer".
To quote the abstract:
The talk was extremely well perceived by the audience. This is very visible by the survey where he got the best reviews also by the fact the we were approached multiple times by persons telling us we need more of this.At the core, the job of a software developer is and has always been the same: writing good, elegant, sustainable and bug-free software that exceeds the expectations of your clients. But the context in which we do our job is changing and with it the skills required to be a great software developer. In this talk, I want to go through a couple of things that I think make the difference between a developer and a great developer. This includes some technical skills and practices, but also non-technical things that you might not consider relevant for a developer at first.
Why this type of events are important to the community
Conferences help you get in touch with other like-minded persons. They keep you up to date with modern technologies and interesting concepts. Also it is great for the companies where it enables them to reach narrowly selected audience, they get to promote himself and be recognizable.
Female participation @ JavaDay
This year we also had our first female speaker Raluca Breaur one of the organizers or the Agile meetups and Java User Group in Iasi, Romania. She had an awesome talk "Caching – oldie but goldie" with great analogies for caching systems.
It is unfortunate that after so many JavaDay this was our first female speaker especially since the from the side of the attendees we had more than 30%.
It is unfortunate that after so many JavaDay this was our first female speaker especially since the from the side of the attendees we had more than 30%.
Few weeks later a nice initiative was started by forming a local chapter of JDutchess. Few of them were also involved in the organization and we extremely grateful.
I am just hoping that next years event will have lot more of this group.
I am just hoping that next years event will have lot more of this group.
What's next
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We continue next year and try to make the event better. Going bigger is also an option but we are not sure if that is the right direction. We definitely wanna raise the organization level and the quality of the event.
Special thanks to the 7 sponsors that supported up and without them the event could not be free.
We had a little competition about choosing the next name for JavaDay so next year we might be called Javalicious.
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| The organizing team |
The survey
Notice the Gaussian distribution for the speaker reviews :)
