Soul Power

Right now I’m sitting in the train back home from Düsseldorf to Mannheim. It’s been two exciting days at the GearConf, a conference centered around software development in teams. Thus the spectrum of talks ranged from rather process oriented ones to tool oriented ones.

Thursday began with a talk on whether a dayly release is really possible. While the headline of the talk is rather catchy the talk set a nice ground note on the rest of the conference as it covered the broad spectrum of challenges in developing as a team.

After being spoilt for ordinary conferences by the Java Posse Roundup, I really enjoyed the very intimate atmosphere of the conference. With about 40 people and 2 session slots each the talks did not have this boring eyes-forward-nature. Here and there discussions began and one could profit from other participants opinions, experiences and questions.

I had my Mylyn talk in the last slot of day one and the talk went quite well (at least considering the feedback afterwards). One of the attendees even said: “This Mylyn thing could even make me drop Vi for Eclipse” :D.

All in all a really cool first day. I even happend to met some guys asking me about Hades. Shameless plugs – included in my talks – did work well :).

Day 2

The second day started with an opening talk by Simon Wiest, German Hudson evangelist that introduced the tool to the audience in a very exciting way. As I found out just now, the same talk had won the Best Presentation Award at the Java Forum Stuttgart already. I really doubt there could have been a better choice. So if you ever happen to step in a development shop where three bear-shaped lamps are placed in a developer room, you can be pretty much sure that Simon has been here to promote Hudson. If I am still to vague, check out this one (German).

My Sonar talk could not really keep up with the Mylyn one, because first a part of my demo wrecked due to Maven deciding to reach out to the internet although there was none available =). Second, because I don’t think I could communicate the key benefits for us as clear as I had expected of myself. Despite that I think the talk gave a good overview and perhaps one or the other will take a glance on it.

All the other talks were pretty cool, but as I already mentioned – the things I tend to take with me from events like this are the hallway conversations. So thanks a lot to all I had the chance to speak to.