Microsoft Comes to the Philadelphia JUG!

On March 22 Microsoft's Brian Benz spoke at the Philadelphia JUG. This was the first meeting after the leadership switch at the JUG and all considering the meeting went pretty well. Brian spoke to us about using Java on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform.

Martin Snyder - current president of the Philadelphia JUG - could not attend due to personal reasons and sent his regrets. We did however have good representation from the board. I served as site coordinator this time and Paul Barton as well as Paul Snyder also attended. We introduced ourselves to the attendees before Brian's talk. Brian's talk was very well received including good Q + A. The slides for his talk are embedded below (click here is you can't see the slides).

Java on Azure from Philly JUG

Below are some cool photos from the meeting (the photos are also linked here). It's worth noting how remarkable it is for Microsoft to be coming to speak at a Java user group. It was unthinkable a mere few years ago but Microsoft is making genuine attempts to court Java developers to Azure. More than anything else this speaks to the continued strength of Java. Whatever one thinks about Microsoft the reality is that the company has always made strong efforts to engage developers. Some sections of Oracle could learn a thing or two about how to engage developers. Indeed I think Microsoft could make a big difference by contributing directly to the JCP. I asked Brian about this during Q + A - he chuckled and suggested this was not the first time he was asked the question. Microsoft's interest in Java is such that my former colleague Yoshio Terada - a long-time Japanese Java EE evangelist with Sun/Oracle - is now working in the Azure team with Brian to engage the Java community.


Besides coming to speak at the JUG, Microsoft very generously also sponsored dinner for attendees and brought some very cool T-shirts highlighting their support of the Java community (the shirts are pictured below). Brian left behind plenty of T-shirts for us to give away in subsequent meetings. Make sure to pick one up if you come to the JUG meetings the next few months.

Our next monthly meeting is going to be on the currently white hot Apache Spark. The month after that we will have two separate meetings - my former colleague Heather VanCura talk about the JCP and we will have Java powered NAO robots (demoed at JavaOne)! I will finish off the season with a talk myself before the JUG goes on brief Summer break.

I hope to see you at a Philadelphia JUG meeting soon!

Recharging the Philadelphia JUG

This might come as a surprise to some - the Philadelphia JUG is one of the oldest, most active and largest Java User Groups in the world. Since early 2000 the JUG has had regular meetings with many local and world-class speakers (I have had the honor to speak at the JUG myself in years past). The JUG membership is well over 1200 and meetings easily see 70-100 developers attending regularly. Believe it or not this is largely thanks to one man - Dave Fecak. After fifteen odd years of remarkable service last year it was quite understandably time for Dave to move on. Unfortunately this meant that the Philadelphia JUG had been struggling to keep it's footing the past few months - until now.

It is simply unacceptable for a JUG with the size and scope of the Philadelphia JUG to be on a downward trajectory. It would be unprecedented for the Java ecosystem and a great loss for the local community. Thankfully a number of us - including myself - stepped up to the task of moving the JUG forward in absence of Dave. In the process the Philadelphia JUG is moving to a collaborative team based leadership model now common to most larger JUGs. We now have setup a leadership board with a president serving Dave's informal designation of JUGMaster. Myself, Jason Young, Paul Burton and Paul Snyder (in no particular order) are board members while Martin Snyder has graciously agreed to accept the JUGMaster role. Brief bios for Martin, Jason, Paul B. and Paul S. are at the end of this post. Beyond the obvious benefits of teamwork the leadership format will allow the JUG to become a legal non-profit entity down the road. As has been the case for other JUGs this may prove to be invaluable in making the JUG not just locally successful but globally influential and we hope a model for up-and-coming JUGs around the world to follow. We also aspire to fully engage Philly JUG members through an open governance model.

As a solid initial step we have lined up some great sessions for the rest of the season ending in Summer - including from Microsoft on using Java on Azure, uber cool NAO robots demoed at JavaOne as well as a very important talk on the Java Community Process from my former colleague Heather VanCura. Indeed we had our first meeting under the new leadership yesterday - I will blog in detail on that meeting in the next few days. I will have the honor of giving the finishing talk for the season in June. During our brief Summer break the leadership will try to plot a course for the future to move the Philadelphia JUG onward and upward.

In doing all of this we need your help. We need all the local volunteers, great speakers, generous event hosts and strong sponsors we can get. If you can help us, please don't hesitate to reach out. I will personally be reaching out to folks in the Java community including star speakers and regional JUG leaders for their support shortly. Together, let's make the Philadelphia JUG another valuable part of Java's ongoing success!

Martin Snyder is the CTO of Wingspan Technology. He brings over 20 years of experience as an executive and architect for enterprise applications, integration, and document management for global enterprise applications. Prior to Wingspan Martin founded and operated Ethermoon Entertainment, a video game development company. He has held leadership positions in Philadelphia, Boston, and Silicon Valley. Martin has also published and presented on a variety of topics over the years, most recently on the Scala programming language and Functional Programming. Martin is very active in the Philadelphia software development community serving as an organizer for Philly JUG, PHASE, Philly ETE and the Northeast Scala Symposium.

Paul Burton is the Technology Director for the Investment Management Unit at SEI Investments. He has been in the Software Industry for over 25 years, working in many positions from Apprentice through Architect to CTO. He is serving as Chair for the British Computer Society's USA Section, a fellow of the society, and a member of their Council. Paul has attended Philly JUG meetings for seven years and wishes to help the group thrive.

Paul Snyder currently works for the consulting arm for FIS (formerly
SunGard). He's been working with Java and JVM languages for over twelve years including Scala, Clojure, and Groovy. He has been involved in the Philly tech scene since 2001, with the Philadelphia Linux Users Group. He founded the first suburban chapter of that group, PLUG West, and is currently a PLUG organizer. He's also a co-organizer for Clojadelphia (the Philadelphia Clojure meetup), the Philly Lambda functional programming group.

Jason Young has been a Java developer since Java 1.0 and has contributed to the success of a range of software projects from modeling/simulation of space systems at Lockheed Martin, to web analytics for Toys R Us, to the Integration Platform as a Service offered by Dell Boomi, to healthcare software for GSI Health. Recently he started a consulting company. Active in the technology community as part of Philly Startup Leaders, he also enjoys helping people on Github and running a technology blog.

CFP Opens for Oredev, the Little Scandinavian Conference with a Big Heart

Oredev is set to take place November 7-11 in Malmo, Sweden. The CFP for Oredev started just a few days ago and will run until March 31.

Although I regularly speak at much larger conferences Oredev has a special place in my heart and this year I've joined the Java track of the program committee for Oredev. There are a few reasons for this. Along with Java2Days, Bulgaria and TDC, Brazil this conference was one of the first to invite me as an international speaker some years ago. Since then I have spoken there quite a few times and every time time it is simply an outstanding experience. In fact one of my most popular talks - Reactive Java EE, Let Me Count the Ways - was born there through brainstorming with an ordinary Oredev attendee with extraordinary ideas. The conference itself is very unique. Although it has roots in .NET, it tries very hard to appeal to a broad audience most certainly including Java developers (the content itself really spans all of IT today). It is one of the few conferences that relies heavily on inviting deserving speakers and paying expenses for all speakers (in Oredev tradition I will be shortly inviting a few folks in the Java community). As a result the conference inevitably curates some of the best speaking talent on the planet. The conference has a strong focus on diversity and social responsibility so you know you are supporting a good cause whether you are speaking or attending. Another very unique thing about the conference is that it is strongly supported by the town of Malmo itself - indeed the speaker dinner is hosted at the Malmo Town Hall with local (nontechnical) dignitaries attending.

The location of Oredev is actually unique too. Malmo sits right at the southern most corner of Sweden literally a channel across from Denmark. The city is small but very cosmopolitan with local tourist attractions and a vibrant nightlife. Very nearby (literally within an hour) you also have Copenhagen, Denmark as well as breathtaking viking artifacts littering a beautiful country side (look at the photos I took from my visit last year). To top all that off the conference itself has regularly organized tours of the city and a party that features a hot Swedish sauna and a naked dip in the freezing cold ocean waters for both speakers and attendees (the naked freezing cold water dip is completely optional of course).

Please do consider submitting to the CFP and joining us in Malmo in November.

Why I Left Oracle - A Confession

I will have the moral courage to make my actions consistent with my knowledge of right and wrong.
                             (See Job 27:5)
I left my job as Java EE evangelist at Oracle on March 4, 2016. If you take a look at my blog post announcing my joining Oracle a few years ago, it won't be hard to spot my skepticism of the role of a professional evangelist and my skepticism of Oracle as a responsible steward of Java. One of the reasons I accepted the job was because of Cameron Purdy amongst a few other key folks at Sun and Oracle. I have followed Cameron's career for a long time. He is clearly a gem in the executive ranks of our industry. He helped pioneer one of the most successful pieces of enterprise infrastructure that has stood the test of time. Yet he is humble enough to still code even in front of a keynote audience. My faith in Cameron was not unfounded. Things have been good for a while certainly in the Java EE community and most importantly inside Oracle. Then Cameron was made to leave Oracle...

The surroundings around Cameron's departure saw my skepticism of Oracle grow exponentially. Make no mistake - this skepticism is not merely around Java standard APIs for the enterprise. It extends to Java on the desktop, browser, client, mobile, embedded and yes, even the core language runtime (this last one being the one most people get distracted focusing far too much on). Indeed the skepticism extends to Sun's entire promising open, collaborative technology portfolio largely centered around the JCP. Whatever your actual or perceived usage and dependency on any part of this portfolio, you shouldn't think for a moment that this doesn't concern you (the sheer number of near-sighted, unbelievably apathetic people in our industry never ceases to amaze and confound me). This is the portfolio that has helped make us all successful for the past two decades. You can be rest assured that if this portfolio does not remain robust we probably won't be celebrating Java's thirty year anniversary like we celebrated it's twenty year anniversary a few months ago.

My growing skepticism is of course independently shared by the ever vigilant Java EE community outside Oracle I have had the honor to serve. They have started to coalesce around these concerns quietly for months now. These are courageous folks I have the greatest regard for. The time is well past due I rejoined these folks in the community to help safeguard the well being of millions of Java developers worldwide and perhaps the well being of global IT itself.

Many people seem to have an impression of Oracle as a company full of corporate drones. This is far from the truth. I wasn't, Cameron wasn't and we are very far from being alone. This entry would not be complete without a respectful salute to these courageous folks. They will need our continued total support no matter what and they do what few others would dare or care to (now including myself). I wish the corporate drones and their masters lots of luck - they are going to need it more than ever.

As for my skepticism of professional evangelists and professional evangelism I am afraid that too remains intact but has decreased slightly over the past few years. One upshot of all of this is that I get to return to what I have found fulfilling for so many years - down-to-earth consulting in the enterprise. Having worn so many different hats now in our ever colorful industry it is the role in which I still find it the easiest to do the right thing for the right people at all times.

Home sweet home.