Confitura – the conference of the season

Last Saturday saw the long-awaited Confitura 2011 conference – previously Javarsovia. We are pleased with SoftwareMill’s not-so-minor involvement in the venture. We feel the conference was a great success, which was possible thanks to:

• the fantastic organisation of the event. Few people know that the 8-member Committee had already started preparations 6 months before the event, coordinating a lot of activity. What makes us even happier is that despite the magnitude of the challenge and the level of obligations entailed, 3 people from the SoftwareMill Team decided to get involved in the organisation of the conference. These were: Tomasz Szymański, Łukasz Lenart and Paweł Wrzeszcz. We owe such good preparation of the event to them and to the Volunteers, whose work was coordinated by Tomasz Dziurko from SoftwareMill.
• carefully selected and painstakingly prepared presentations, which were given in 4 parallel thematic tracks. We would particularly like to thank all the participants of the lectures Uncloud your applications and Manipulating beans or CDI Portable Extensions, also for their subsequent positive comments on Twitter. The first meeting was led by Adam Warski and Tomasz Szymański, and the second by Adam only. Naturally, both of them work at SoftwareMill.
• sponsor and partner involvement. SoftwareMill had a role to play here too, as we were a Confitura partner and traditionally gave a prize. The winner was drawn at the end of the conference from among participants of the event. This year, chosen through a vote by the conference participants, it was a PC Samsung Galaxy Tab P1010 WIFI Tablet. Nearly 500 people took part in the draw, although of course only one of them could get lucky. Congratulations to the winner, and a big thank you to everyone else for taking part, and we hope to see you at the next edition.

Spontaneous presentation of the prize sponsored by SoftwareMill.

• unprecedented turnout. Confitura 2011 had over 800 participants (official data from the organisers). This is a really imposing result. However, far more important than participant numbers was their level of interest in the subject matter presented. Additionally, people were very open and happy to integrate. Thank you for all the conversations at the SoftwareMill booth and at SPOINA, the afterparty.

We’ll definitely see you next year, and in the meantime please come to AgileByExample in the Autumn.