GeeCON 2013 recap

10 Jun 2013.3 minutes read

Maciek Biłas:

This was the 4th edition of GeeCON I attended. The conference unlike any other brings together Java and JVM language programmers from all around Poland as well as a handful of others from neighbouring countries.

This year we had 3 days of great technical sessions divided into four tracks presented by speakers both invited and selected from a Call for Papers process.

Sam Newman’s talks are my personal favourite. He already presented last year and proved to be an inspiring speaker. I recommend you to see the recording[1] from his last year’s talk while waiting for GeeCON 2013 to be available online. My thanks also go to Szczepan Faber, Daniel Spiewak, Kirk Pepperdine, Lars George and Grzegorz Kossakowski for talks that I had great pleasure to attend.

If you’re reading this and thinking of attending next year edition of the conference I’ll give you one last tip: choose talks that will absorb you or drink a good deal of coffee – the comfy cinema chairs coupled with long sessions and dimmed lights will make you want to sleep.

[1] https://vimeo.com/47515968

GeeCON 2013 recap

Tomek Dziurko:

This was my second GeeCON. What I remember the most from 2012 was not the talks (which were quite good actually) but all the stuff that were happening around the conference: cinema packed with passionate people, discussions during breaks and of course evenings.

And this year was no different. Very good talks and even better evenings. What I like the most in GeeCON is that evenings are organised and each day after the talks you know exactly where you can meet fellow programmers and have a chat in a more relaxed atmosphere with pint of beer in your hand. But despite being familiar with all this GeeCON-sphere stuff, this year was also first time when I was actually involved in building this unique experience for other attendees by organising GeeCON Train.

GeeCON Train powered by SoftwareMill was the first official before-party conference event for attendees. Here in SML we always enjoy trips to conferences taking place in different cities so we though why not gather more developers and travel with them giving everyone great opportunity to meet new people, discuss, exchange experiences and simply socialise. So over 20 people spent 3 hours in a train to Cracow having good time.

So what I will remember from GeeCON 2013? Of course GeeCON Train, new interesting people met there and many new stuff I have learnt during organising it. And from talks there were two that I could recommend:
- “Making Java Unit Test Groovy with Spock” by Ken Sipe, because when you start using Spock suddenly all other testing libraries look ugly and hard to work with.
- “Java Developer Career Unplugged” by Wojtek Seliga. Non-controversial (if you saw Wojtek’s talk during Confitura 2012 you know what I mean), well presented guidance what concious decisions we should make to let our professional career flourish.

GeeCON 2013 recap

Lukasz Lenart:

This year GeeCON was a totally different for me comparing to the previous one – it was first time when I was a speaker at GeeCON :-) I’m highly involved in Apache Struts project and I was giving presentation about security vulnerabilities in the project. I was trying to present a few recently discovered security holes, that were the vector of attack and how to secure your application. Base on that I wanted to increase people awareness of overall security in applications – just to highlight some insights about testing and to be more involved in a community around framework of choice.

What can I say? In my opinion it was a small disaster : I had been giving this talk on local OWASP Cracow chapter meeting, during DevCrowd conference in Szczecin to be prepared for GeeCON. And as it was the first time when I was a presenter on such a conference – stress ate me :D The stage and audience is overwhelming – with lights pointed on you, you can feel the pressure to be a presenter at the international highly rated conference for Java geeks :-)

It’s very hard to me to talk more about the conference itself – I was too focused on my talk. The one thing I can recall is the lunch during the first day – it was delicious. And I could attend just one day, but for sure next year I will be waiting impatiently for the next GeeCON to meet others and have fun during all four days :-)

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