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JavaZone Oslo 2015 review

16 Sep 2015 . conf . Comments #conference review javazone oslo

I attended the JavaZone conference in Oslo on 9th and 10th September 2015.

JavaZone is a conference for Java developers created by the Norwegian Java User Group javaBin. The conference was in Oslo and talks were given in English and Norwegian, albeit the majority of them were in English. There were about 2500 attendees, 200 speakers and 7 parallel sessions.

It was the 14th anniversary of the JavaZone conference and its maturity was really visible almost everywhere. Why almost? You will find out later.

Let’s begin

The conference started with an impressing intro movie. It is very short but I recommend you to see it. There was also a live show.

Best talk

The quality of talks was really good. The best talk, which I saw during two days of the conference, was “IntelliJ IDEA Tips and Tricks” by Hadi Hariri. I have been using IntelliJ IDEA for a few years but I have learnt a lot. For example you can try to experiment with:

  • Action: Test RESTful Web Services
  • Help -> Productivity Guide
  • Plugin Presentation Assistant
  • Shift Shift
  • Turn off tabs (Settings -> Editor Tabs), use Ctrl-E instead
  • New Scratch File (I have seen it before but I used it only once)
  • Inject language or reference + Edit (eg. JSON) fragment

and much more. For details I recommend you to see a presentation

Organisation

The organisation was perfect. You could focus only on listening great talks. Plenty of space, fresh, cold air, nice sound system, best ever catering (including caviar :).

The conference also offered a really practical solution in the overflow room, where you could follow any of the ongoing sessions with both video and audio. Just awesome! I used this solution about three times, when I was not sure which talk I wanted to attend.

A party (“AweZone”) was in the same venue as the conference, so it was very convenient. The party consisted of three concerts by Norwegian artists. And here is one minus for the organizers. There was only 1 stand with free beers and 3 stands where you could buy a beer for 49 or 59 NOK. As you can imagine, there was a huge queue.

Summary

It was the best conference I have ever attended. GOTO conference in Amsterdam was just dethroned.