Nicolas and I were given the opportunity to speak at the JAOO conference in Denmark. It was the first time we attended this conference - a memorable experience for us that went beyond that "newcomer" sensation.
The organizers impressed us. JAOO, created ten years ago by Danish company EOS, is a popular conference. Its success goes beyond its employees. An entire community is centered on JAOO. The feeling this gives is difficult to put into words - to experience it is really incredible.
The company and community dedicated to the conference amazed us. It was evident that everyone involved put forth a great deal of leisure time into it. The commitment of students from Danish universities, a.k.a. "The Crew" volunteered every type of assistance wherever they could. It was inspiring to see every person involved in the conference was also integrated into their city and their national culture: health. Each year the JAOO-IT Run, a sporting event, is organized around the conference to encourage attendees to get more exercise.
The level of dedication and community efforts made me think of this group as a Small Giant, which refers to a book I am reading. A Small Giant is a company (or organization) that has opportunities to grow but chooses deliberately to remain small (in the numbers sense) with the goal to maintain excellence. The main principle is harmonious integration of a community centered on a company.
Our own sessions at the JAOO were successful - another reason we had a memorable experience. Every seat in our sessions was filled. We presented a dozen TechAnims about Spring and Hibernate technologies called Extreme Visual Learning. (A similar example, the Jasper Reports TechAnim was published recently on the web in cooperation with TheServerSide.com.) Feedback from the attendees was very positive. Talking about Spring with .NET developers is refreshing and rare - an experience that is difficult to find at many conferences.
That leads to the last point: JAOO is about developers as a community. It's not only for Java developers (like us), for .NET developers, and the rest. We are developers — FIRST. Sure, some topics and technologies will attract more interest from Java-focused programmers. But, many topics go beyond technologies (concurrency, DSL, methodology...)
Next up for Nicolas and I:
The J-Fall conference in the Netherlands.
John Rizzo
Co-founder of JavaBlackBelt
October 9, 2006
Brussels
We thank each of them for dedicated, hard work to make these exams possible.
It requires 50 contribution points. In the near future, and we might temporarily lower this to 0.
The procedure is to send an auction item using the delivery address
provided by the user. The publisher or distributor handles delivery. The only tracking we have is
an email stating the date it was sent. In particular countries we don't have access to additional
information even when we send it personally.
We know this is frustrating. It is for us too: we have to pay for packages that never reach their
destination. What's more, Café Press told us, "We don't guarantee shipping fulfillment."
Starting today there will be concurrent auctions: electronic Amazon gift certificates (Amazon
guarantees orders) and books/T-shirts (fulfilled by publishers/Café Press.)
If you live in a place where the postal service isn't reliable, bidding for a book/T-shirt is at your
own (points) risk. If you would like to suggest other types of gift certificates that can be used in
your home country, please let us know.
For users who have won a recent T-shirt auction that live in countries that have delivery issues
your points will be returned.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
A new feature is active on JavaBlackBelt, to help focus contributions.
You probably noticed that when adding a question to the Java SE - Basic exam, you get a discouraging message. This exam contains too many hard questions and we need to slow down the contributions there to ease the manual filtering (question moving).
We also bring a motivating way to focus question authors where it's the most useful: a bonus factor associated with some exams.