What happens at GeekOut stays in GeekOut … no wait, that's not true. What happens at GeekOut blows your mind! GeekOut stands out from other Java related conferences as it's an event organized by developers for developers. Huh? Haven't we heard this before? Sure there were talented speakers and vendors alike however there's a key distinction: all speakers and vendors were hand picked by the GeekOut organizing committee. Vendors were required to send engineers instead of sales representatives. This meant zero sales pitches and a high level of technical questions and feedback being exchanged between attendees and vendors. Some even hacked code side by side! Another thing I noticed later was the background music being played thru out the conference. A very nice selection of easy listening tunes that didn't distract too much yet made you pause for a moment and enjoy the vibe.
The choice of venue was also an interesting selection as it lend itself for a unique layout. All vendors were located near the walls, leaving the center space ready for a podium and 4 big screens. Here's a screenshot taken from the 2nd floor
The conference began on Wednesday with a full day of workshops. I had the pleasure to present a 4 hour JavaFX workshop. To my surprise there were a bit more than 30 attendees, practically everyone knew little about JavaFX and hungrily devoured the content.
Source code can be found at github. Speaking of which, the second workshop of the day was about Git and GitHub, presented by Jordan and Brent. I consider myself a pedestrian Git user at best (even after using it for more than 4 years now), this workshop had a good mixture of GitHub features vs git commands; I certainly learned a trick or two along the way. There's even a video of Simon interviewing me, rambling^H^H^H commenting on what transpired that day.
The next day we were regaled by Geert's amazing musical skills when he played his eigenharp during the opening keynote. Then came Attila Szegedi, followed by Jürgen Höler, Kohsuke Kawaguchi and Tobias Lindaaker; each one of them delivering such great content that I immediately knew I was in trouble for Friday. How on earth was I able to keep up with these guys? A plan was drafted but then Ryan Sciampacone, Sven Peters and Sam Aaron smashed it to pieces the very next day. Man, these guys are tough 
The hour of truth approached quickly. The room started to fill up with people coming from the break. Slide deck? Check. Clicker and batteries? Check. Demo code? Ditto. Game face? It's on baby! And so, some interesting facts about Groovy ASTs were unleashed upon the audience. Apparently all went well as there were questions asked during the presentation; I've been told Estonians refrain from doing such thing, rather prefer to approach speakers at the end of their presentations (which also happened). Achievement unlocked!
Earlier that day I had the chance to make a brief demonstration of 2 Griffon applications running side by side; one was built with Swing, the other with JavaFX. If you squint your eyes a little bit you can see the Swing app on the left and the JavaFx app on the right in the following pic
The demo was based on an updated codebase discussed on a previous blog entry. The main takeaway is that Griffon eases up the migration from Swing to JavaFX. Thanks go to Anton for the opportunity.
Kudos to ZeroTurnaorund, the GeekOut organizing committee and the Geekout crew for assembling such a great event. Speakers, vendors and attendees, this show was made by you and for you; be proud of the result
Keep on Groovying!
