Events
20 "Cakes" of Java in Brazil
To celebrate 20 Years of Java we did a cross-country tour in Brazil for 20 days, visiting Java User Groups and Events across the country. It was long and grueling, but a lot of fun. And most importantly, we got to eat cake! Cake for breakfast (thanks to Otavio and his chocolate passion) and a Java cake for dinner... every single day!
More Java and VTS
I recently change roles at Oracle... previously I was a Java Technology Evangelist and now I am a Java Community Manager. So, you may be asking yourself what is the difference between an evangelist and a community manager... Here is the quick breakdown: Evangelists preach while managers buy pizza... looking forward to buying pizza for some JUGs! :) They probably won't "invite" me to customer meetings anymore... somehow I am fine with that. The Java part is still the same, so I can legitimately get away with drinking gourmet coffee and calling it work! And as part of my new role I am getting pulled into a lot of our community outreach efforts. You will see more of these showing up on my blog, but the most imminent one is the upcoming Virtual Technology Summit (VTS). It is like a conference, but without the annoying vendors. ;)
Devoxx4Kids Raspberry Pi and NAO Workshop
With the help of some local parents, I ran a Raspberry Pi and NAO Robot workshop for teach programming to 10-14 year old children. By the end of the 4 hour session, all of the kids were able to assemble a Raspberry Pi and touchscreen, program changes to a simple Java-based game, and create behaviors that ran on the NAO humanoid robot. Not bad for a sleepy vacation day. :)
NightHacking Worldwide Event with Brian Goetz
On January 16th, I will be holding a worldwide hack day with Brian Goetz and Stuart Marks on Java 8 lambdas. This will be a 3 hour lab on Java 8 lambdas kicked off with a live streamed presentation from Brian Goetz. Brian and Stuart will stay for the duration to answer questions and help with the lab, and we will have other surprises in store for the live stream.
Congrats to the 2013 JavaOne Rock Stars!
Each year at JavaOne we recognize the best speakers of the conference as voted on by attendees through the surveys. This year the overall reviews given by attendees were higher on average, so I guess we did something right with the content... :) However, it also means the criteria for getting awarded a JavaOne Rock Star was even more difficult.
NightHacking on Devices, Bytecodes, and Kids!
At the upcoming J-Fall event I will be live streaming from the balcony with 3 different special guests. Gerrit will be showing some of his latest hacking with JavaFX on the Raspberry Pi, Jan Kees will give us some "real" hacking with Java on bytecodes, and we will close out with Saskia on the Devoxx4Kids Netherlands event she helped to run last week.
Devoxx 4 Kids Netherlands
I was invited to speak at the Devoxx 4 Kids Netherlands event, so I dropped in right after my Gosling interview. This was literally right after Hawaii. I had only 24 hours at home between events, which was just enough time to put the finishing touches on Lego Duke version 6.1 (the replacement for the one stolen in San Francisco).
NightHacking Gosling Recording Wrap-up
Finished the live stream with James Gosling this morning, and have posted it in all the usual places including the new NightHacking website and the Java Youtube channel. I ended up editing out a few small portions due to feedback in the audio recording, but overall it came out pretty good.
NightHacking Photos of Robots, Boats, and the Father of Java
I got quite a lot of great photos the past couple days while hanging out with James Gosling and the rest of the Liquid Robotics staff in Hawaii. Some of these will make it in to the live video stream a few hours from now, but it is interesting to see the aquatic robots up close.
NightHacking with Gosling on the Big Island
DIY Raspberry Pi Workshop for Kids
I did a successful workshop this past weekend at Silicon Valley Code Camp with 50 very enthusiastic future developers. They were ages 10 and up, and everyone in the class got a Java game running on their Pis, and made 2 or more improvements in the span of a few hours.
Geek Bike Ride Shanghai
I have been involved in the Geek Bike Ride events from the inception in Brazil, and I have to say that the event yesterday in Shanghai was the hottest ever! Well, literally the hottest, because of the 100 degree weather (plus humidity), but also with a great turnout from the local GreenTea JUG. While we had a great set of riders from around the world including Michael Hüttermann, Bert Ertman, and Arun Gupta, we also had a lot of local Shanghai coders come out for the ride.
Top 5 Reasons to Hack in Iceland
I had a great team hacking with the JUGICE members in Iceland last night as the first stop on the Nordic NightHacking Tour. They created some pretty cool projects in JavaFX for the Raspberry Pi within only a few hours (many of whom had never tried JavaFX before):
Nordic NightHacking Tour Schedule
With the trip coming up in a week, I figured it was about time to put the full event itinerary in one place. For this I created a public Nordic NightHacking Google Calendar containing all of the events along with links to sign-up.
NightHacking Nordic Tour
My last NightHacking tour through Europe was a huge success, but I missed a big part of Europe. The farthest North I was able to go was the United Kingdom, which means I missed all the Scandinavian countries, Iceland, and Finland.
JavaOne Latin America Wrap-up
JavaOne Latin America in Sao Paulo Brazil just ended. It was a great event that had a huge community presence, which was responsible for selecting over 50% oft the content, and supported it throughout.
NightHacking with James Gosling
James Gosling, the original Java NightHacker (see his great blog at http://nighthacks.org/), will be joining me this Wednesday to kick off the NightHacking Tour on a live video stream. This is a chance to watch James live and interact with him via the social stream (via UStream or by tweeting with #nighthacking) as we chat, hack, and discover some of the things he has been working on in his new gig at Liquid Robotics.
NightHacking Tour - The Road to Devoxx
From October 28th through November 11th I am going to be traveling by motorcycle across Europe and live-streaming events and interviews along the way. This includes the J-Fall and Devoxx conferences as well as an all-star line-up of interviews, including the following geeks:
Taking it Virtual!
I did a presentation at the Agile 2012 conference in Dallas on how to do Agile release planning with distributed teams. This is something that we struggled with at my last company since we had 300 developers split into 40+ teams in 5 different countries.
Kids Making the Future of Java
I had the opportunity to participate in the Make the Future of Java Workshop last week, which was a lot of fun. Kids ages 13 and up got a chance to learn how to program using Alice and Greenfoot technologies.