Speaking Adventures at J-Spring, Devoxx UK, GeeCON, and Spring I/O
As a Developer Advocate at Okta, I'm expected to travel up to 25% per month to speak at conferences and meetups. This May was more like 50%! I had opportunities to contribute to a number of cool conferences in exotic cities that I was eager to accept.
My adventure began on Monday, May 8 when I flew to Amsterdam to speak at the J-Spring conference. It was the first time the NLJUG hosted this conference in several years. I marveled at the venue and especially liked the outdoor area it offered during breaks. The walk from/to the train station was pretty nice too.
I spoke about Microservices for the Masses with Spring Boot, JHipster, and JWT. Feedback I received mentioned it was a bit too fast and I crammed too much into the 50-minute time slot. I do tend to mention everything I know about topics when I speak, so I apologize for trying to cram too much in.
After J-Spring, I flew to London to speak at Devoxx UK. I arrived just in time to catch the speaker's dinner and had fun seeing and catching up with old friends from the conference circuit.
Thursday morning, I had an Angular workshop and did my microservices presentation in the afternoon. Friday, I had an early morning talk on Front End Development for Back End Developers. You can find all my presentations below.
I rushed straight from my last talk on Friday to the airport to catch a flight to Boston for the weekend. In Boston, we celebrated Trish's brother's 50th birthday, Mother's Day, and had a blast with friends and family.
The following Monday, I hopped on a plane to return to Europe with Krakow (for GeeCON) as my destination. Three flights later and I arrived in time to take a nice stroll around the city, enjoying the greenery.
At GeeCON, I spoke about how to build a progressive web app with Ionic, Angular, and Spring Boot. Half of my talk was live coding and I almost got all my demos working. Deploying to Cloud Foundry and my phone was the final step, and due to Xcode updating, that demo failed. I wrote a tutorial about Ionic for the Okta developer blog that has everything (and more!) that I showed in my demo.
I had to head straight to the airport after finishing my talk, this time heading for Spring I/O in Barcelona. Barcelona has always been on Trish's bucket list, so I easily talked her into joining me. At Spring I/O, I did a workshop on developing with Spring Boot and Angular, followed by my Front End Development for Back End Developers talk. There weren't that many talks on front-end development, so I felt privileged to be one of the few talking about UI development.
I also enjoyed Deepu's talk on JHipster and Sebastien's talk on Keycloak. It was the first time I'd met these great guys in person, so that was a lot of fun.
At @spring_io where @java_hipster's meet pic.twitter.com/I9OPErVWeF
— Deepu K Sasidharan (@deepu105) May 18, 2017
On Friday, Trish and I hit some of the sites in Barcelona and had a wonderful time. The weather was beautiful, the architecture was amazing, and the experience was awesome.
Thanks to the organizers of each conference for allowing me to speak and for covering my travel expenses. My company doesn't pay for overseas conferences (yet!), but they do pay me while I'm there, so that's nice. To everyone that attended my sessions - thank you! I really appreciate the feedback and will do my best to improve future talks. If you have additional feedback, feel free to contact me.
In the meantime, keep an eye on the Okta developer blog. I've been writing a lot of articles lately and there's more to come in the pipeline! Here's a few that've been published in the last month.
Posted by Tom Li on May 27, 2017 at 03:28 PM MDT #