“How dare you!”, says Joe Smith; “I’m planning to be working twelve hours a day at this show trying to absorb technical wisdom from all these Java gurus. What vacation are you talking about?”

Hey Joe, just change your attitude. Don't spoil the party. JavaOne is a place with a super-high Java energy. Sort of a Java spa. Being in the place with the highest possible concentration of people sharing a passion for the same thing is like a medical procedure - just being there will cure and recharge your worn-out brain. Enjoy the fluids...

In the morning , light breakfast, and then not more than two brain-massaging technical sessions. Make sure that most of your sessions are given by professional masseuses. Who is teaching is more important than what they teach. Then, two hours lunch break. Eat slowly, enjoy your food, and stop drinking these soft-killing-sodas. Use my diet.

After lunch walk around the vendors area. Do not get intimidated. Like the design of this T-shirt? Just stop by the booth, introduce yourself and spend five minutes listening to the brouhaha about how the product XYZ will revolutionize your life. Get the T-shirt and move to the next table. Look at these nice little glowing pens! Aren’t they something? Just give these vendors your business card and bring home a couple of pens for your kids. You'll sure get this annoyning phone call from their saleseman in a month or so, but it's in a month... and your kids will start enjoing these pens next week. Daddy came back from a business trip! What did you get for us? Look at this lady in red: she carries a huge bag of freebies and brochures. Trust me, she’s not going to read them. In the best case scenario, she'll bring them to her office after the show. But most likely she'll leave them in the hotel room.

On a more serious note, if you are really interested in a particular technology, you’d better spend some time at the vendors’ tables. For example, if you are interested in Java messaging in general, stop by every company that offers their implementation of JMS. You’ll find some strong technical people who researched this particular technology really well. You may not get access to their bodies that easily any time soon, especially if you live in a small town somewhere in Alabama.

After lunch, I prescribe you an intake of up to two more technical sessions in the closed rooms, and then blend in again with the Java crowd. In the evening, take one beer, then one BOF session, and two more beers. Of course, it would be very stupid to miss the Java Champions BOF on Thursday at 7:30PM. You’ll see a dream-team of well-known Java leaders there. Again, it’s good just to be there because of even higher concentration of Java-sharpened-minds per square foot. I’ll spend 10 min there teaching you how to become a Java community leader. Yeah, right! Hey, teachers, leave us kids alone! As of today, I do not know what I’m going to say to you. And not because I do not have anything to say, but because I’m not planning to prepare my short speech. I’ll just let it go. Whatever's on my mind at that moment (I do have one Powerpoint slide though).

Attend a couple of keynote sessions. The topic is not important, but speaker’s personality is. If s/he was able to get invited to give a keynote talk at JavaOne, this deserves 50 minutes of your precious time. Most likely though, you’ll be having hard time remembering next day what that motivational keynote speech was about. Bright future? Open sourcing Java? Why EJB still deserves a second look? And most importantly, did he cut his ponytail? Will he? I can’t trust my memory anymore, so I'll be taking notes and blog from the show on a daily basis. I might get myself in trouble again, as it happened after I’ve asked a question and published my notes at a recent conference. Oh well.

During the last two weeks I’m receiving lots of invites to meet with particular vendors, who want to present their latest  products. Some of them will become THE products in the future, but I try not to make any commitments. I’m on vacation,  and will try to enjoy every minute of it. At this point I’ve registered to attend the NetBeans day on Monday and nine technical session for the rest of the show. On Tuesday at 12:30PM I’ll be giving an interview at the Community Corner. I was invited to a dinner on Monday and a VIP party Wednesday night, Thursday night is for BOF and the After Dark Bash party. Every morning from 5AM to 6AM I'll be working on the next chapter of upcoming Java-related book. And 6AM to 7AM is my blogging time so stay tuned.

posted Sunday, 7 May 2006