20 years of Java in Java One and Java Day Guatemala

For me 2015 hacktivism is officially closed, this year I had the opportunity to attend my first Java One and met some of my development heroes, folks from another JUGs, being trapped at Patricia's hurricane (no kidding), and bring a huge amount of Java t-shirts to Guatemala. I must say thanks to the people that made this trip possible, special acknowledgments to Nichole Scott from Oracle, my peers at Nabenik that gratefully sponsored my trip and the Guatemala Java User Group for allowing me to take advantage of the Java One ticket :-D.

I think that every techie has a list of conferences to attend before die, as 2015 my top five is:

• JavaOne (2015 finally)
• Gentoo Miniconf
• OSCON
• Forum Internacional de Sofware Livre - FISL (2013 as a speaker yey!)
• Convención de Informatica Guatemala (2005 - now dead, but it made the list for nostalgia)

Although I had some health issues due stress, Java One and San Francisco were lifetime experiences. As each conference I've attended, it has its goods and bads but in general you can feel a strong sense of community between attendants, from Pivotal to Red Hat (and Microsoft), from the peer that shares a beer with you and turns out to be a Java Champion to the people that speaks another languages with you, Java One is about community making awesome things in IT. Programming languages aren't eternal but I can state that the differential factor that raised 20-year languages like Java and JavaScript among the others is the community.

Random photos:

In a different scale but in the same sense of community, the Guatemala Java User Group held its yearly conference Java Day Guatemala.

I've been involved directly in the organization of 2 Java Days and spoken in three. As I said in our keynote, for me GuateJUG has been the most successful user group where I've participated. Characterized by pragmatism, openness and community structure since its inception, GuateJUG became one of the strongest user groups in Central America, the integration between industry, academia, Open Source communities, Free Software communities and HR people looking for the next generation of developers is unique.

As a special occasion we held a traditional birthday celebration, including birthday cake and mexican piñatas. It was great to share words with some old friends and meet new IT enthusiasts, as a matter of fact we also sang "Happy birthday Java and happy birthday GuateJUG".

Video and some more random photos:

I hope to see you the next year in Java One and Java Day :-).