IT Jam 2011 Report

Last weekend I attended the IT Jam 2011 conference in Odessa. The experience was so intense and vivid, that I'm still recovering from the trip and only recently have managed to sort out all correspondence gathered while I'm gone.

Odessa is a great place for such a conference and it attracted 1000+ IT professionals. Before the opening, I've managed to get my caffeine dope from a great café in the downtown.

Odessa is able to impress. It welcomed us with great sunny weather, distinctive architecture, impressive industrial skyline of a port, good restaurants and dynamic night life.

The conference itself was hosted in the marine passenger terminal - probably one of the few places in Odessa capable to hold an event of that magnitude.

 
The talks were divided in 6 streams - Main stage, Java, .Net, Web, Mobile and QA.

I was giving a talk in the Java stream called "Gradle - next generation of build tools". It was a lot of fun - listeners were very positive, easygoing and responsive. And according to tweets the talk was accepted quite well.

The only thing I regret is that I haven't positioned the talk properly. And some people got the impression that I'm trying to persuade them to migrate on Gradle right away (which I'm not). I just wanted to increase product awareness, so Java developers would mark on their radar another convenient build integration tool. And it makes a good sense, since according to my initial quiz nobody uses Gradle.

Along the way I've mentioned Polyglot Maven as a way to handle pom.xml complexity. Apache Ivy also came into view - I was really surprised, that nobody actually knows about it.

My presentation is available at SlideShare (in Russian). I actually made a really fun mistake in the code, which hasn't passed unnoticed. While making a "hello world" program for Gradle I first made it say "hello world!" but than decided to change it to "hello Gradle". However, I've forgotten to change the original source, only the output has been changed. So I ended up with println "hello world" seems like printing "hello Gradle". My appologies :)

The conference was very dynamic with a lot of people going back and forth between the talks. I've met a lot of interesting people and had the opportunity to chat with folks I haven't seen for a while.

There was some problems with food availability during the lunch. I, however, skip some talks to visit the summer lounge in a good Odessa restaurant.

So I was really surprised to see all the whining in twitter that all food is gone. No, it is not! Just get outside and find a good restaurant to eat - your are in Odessa after all!

But somebody expected on free conference to get free food to boot. So naive and immature on their part. As for the conference organizers, they probably should have cleared more time for lunch. I don't have any other complains with organization at all - the event was great and all small inconveniences was inevitable for such a scale. They were caused by the complexity of the event itself and not by the lack of organizational effort (people complained a lot about sound isolation in improvised stages - well, just try to find a better place to host 2000 people!).

IT Jam was closed by a spectacular rock show featuring several rock/punk/metal bands consisting mostly of IT-people. The sound was harsh and loud - exactly what we needed after the whole day of tech talks.

After last chords everybody could enjoy Odessa nightlife.

Italian tall ship "Amerigo Vespucci" was in Odessa harbour at the time. Truly sailing work of art attracting both locals and tourists.

You can find photo report from my trip here.

In summary, I want to thank Ciklum for the effort in organizing the conference. The jam was a fascinating event. It was worth the time and energy to visit. And I'm looking forward for the next year jam. Let it be bigger, brighter and louder!