Brighton Java has settled into its traditional Christmas break. And it’s great that we’re established enough to have a tradition! When we started in 2012 it was difficult to get going but this year things have taken off. We have 260 people in the group and our last session was full with very little promotion.
A lot of this is due to the sponsorship we’ve had. The Skiff provide us with a great venue, and we’ve had a great deal of support from Brandwatch – the promise of pizza and drinks definitely draws people in. I’ve also had some help from James Stanier and Luke Whiting with organisation and planning.
It’s now time to start planing the 2015 events. Next year I’d like to try to have an event every month. We had hoped to have a Hack Day as part of the Brighton Science Festival. That wasn’t possible, but I hope we can arrange something similar later in the year. I’m also hoping to bring in more students from the universities, as well as some academic speakers. I’d also like to see some smaller, more technical workshop events.
This is an exciting time for Java, and the claims that it was dying or “21st century COBOL” are quietening down, replaced by excitement over new JVM languages, microservices and the possibility of finally getting some long-promised features in Java 9. I’m very excited about the talks and events to come from Brighton Java in 2015.
So, thank you to the Skiff, Brandwatch, everyone who came to the talks and of course to all to the speakers, who for 2014 were:
- James Burt: Solving poetry with Java
- Laurence Barry: Agile: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous
- Andrew Walters: Hazelcast: Distributed Computing, Simplified
- James Stanier: Detecting events on the web in real-time
- Functional Brighton: Lambda expressions in Java 8
- John Patrick: Vagrant
- Lloyd Nye: An Introduction to Microservices
- Luke Whiting: Dr Strangedev, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Release!
- John Spicer: Software Testers are your Fiends
- James Grant:The Garbage Collector.
- Douglas Hoskins: Cross-platform mobile development
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James Stanier: Spring Boot: cool stuff, really fast
I’ve enjoyed the sessions, and am grateful to all the speakers – I think we’ve provided a varied and up-to-date range of talks. If you’d like to be involved in 2015, please get in touch.
The next session will be on Wednesday February 4th 2015, at the Skiff. Details and signup will be via the meetup group Wednesday January 7th 2015. I will be speaking about applying microservice techniques to monoliths and my colleague Danielle Ashley will discuss an inappropriate Scala project.
(PS – I’ve set up a Linked-In group for people who like that sort of thing)