Jim Driscoll's Blog

JavaOne: What worked and what didn't

One thing we'll do is have a Lessons Learned meeting, and I want to be ready - so I thought I'd throw out my ideas for what worked and what didn't, and ask for a little help in working on my list. Here's your chance to kvetch with me!

First, what worked: I thought the talks pretty much rocked. Now, prehaps I'm a little biased, but really, I didn't hit any clunkers. This is the one thing I DON'T need to worry about for the meeting, since we'll have *very* accurate data on attendance and evaluations. But I'm pretty pleased with this, since the talks *are* mostly why you came to JavaOne, right? Also, I thought that the keynotes were mostly OK, and there were some neat demos.

The food at lunch wasn't bad - for cafeteria food, anyway (ok, it's a low bar). And the lines for lunch moved more quickly than I would have thought possible, given just how many people were filing through there.

I'm going to go out on a limb, but I'm going to say that by the last day, the reserved seating thing was working well. Over and over again, I went to full talks, confident that I'd get in. The lines moved much faster, crowd control was better, and they had more card readers and docents.

Then, there's what didn't work: The stage crew was noticably incompetant. I watched a speaker beg for his slides to be shown for about 4 minutes - and this was the third time that that had happened to him that talk. And it happened to him in a previous talk that day. And he wasn't alone. Demo screens only on the left side of the room? Excuse me? There were lots of problems with audio in 307. And ask any keynote demo person about the sysadmins... and you'll get an earful. The WiFi was up and down like a yoyo. But at least the cardreaders worked better than last year - in fact, I think those worked well.

A loud audible alarm went off at the end of a speaker's talk - several commented that they would have liked a more subtle 1 minute warning, though other speakers seemed to have no trouble - by watching the clock up on stage.

I think that covers it - did I miss anything? Tell me below. Both bad and good (so we don't forget to do it next time :-)

See you next year!

Comments

• The pavillion area worked quite well - good atmosphere, enough space between booths etc.
  The queues to get into some session were just ridiculous the first two days - after that, it was OK. But for the first two days, I rarely made it in before 5 minutes into the talks.
  You really have to do something about the schedule builder. The webstart version over at Javazone was much better - but it wasn't hooked up with the real schedule builder, so you couldn't actually enroll into sessions. Please do a fancy Ajax-enabled version next year!
  Putting up a few big screens with the schedule of the next two timeslots including changes would be nice.
  In the sessions, there were often many vacant seats in the middle of the rows. Perhaps having more aisles would give a better seat usage?

  Finally, could you get the exhibitors to raffle off some of their booth babes next year? :-)

  Posted by: nielsull on May 19, 2006 at 05:35 PM

• The pavillion area worked quite well - good atmosphere, enough space between booths etc.
  The queues to get into some session were just ridiculous the first two days - after that, it was OK. But for the first two days, I rarely made it in before 5 minutes into the talks.
  You really have to do something about the schedule builder. The webstart version over at Javazone was much better - but it wasn't hooked up with the real schedule builder, so you couldn't actually enroll into sessions. Please do a fancy Ajax-enabled version next year!
  Putting up a few big screens with the schedule of the next two timeslots including changes would be nice.
  In the sessions, there were often many vacant seats in the middle of the rows. Perhaps having more aisles would give a better seat usage?

  Finally, could you get the exhibitors to raffle off some of their booth babes next year? :-)

  Posted by: nielsull on May 19, 2006 at 05:35 PM

• I concur with the other person about the schedule builder. In years past, there has been a calendar showing all sessions starting at a given time. That was much more convenient. This year, those things really had to be pieced together.

  Also, the lines were really slowed down by the number of card readers at the door. Try to get it so that you can check with out slowing down the flow. RFID 20 feet before the door?

  Otherwise, I really thought the technical depth of the sessions offered and that I attended was much deeper this year. Thank you!

  Posted by: bob on May 20, 2006 at 12:12 AM

• Yep, the schedule builder sucked. One of the most frustrating things was that, when you found a conflict, there wasn't an easy way to resolve it on the page illustrating the conflict. You could have just put a radio button on there asking which session you wanted to register for, rather than forcing us to to to our schedule & remove a session, and then go back and find the one we wanted to add, and add it. Tedious.
  I thought the lunch break was a bit tight, too. If you wanted to get to both the 11.00 and 12.15 sessions, you only had 12.00-12.15 to get lunch with the other 10,000 guys who were doing the same. Then, of course, you had to settle for being rude enough to eat your lunch in someone's session - either rustling a brown bag or smelling of garlic chicken. Not much chance to keep John Gage happy by chatting to people over lunch.
  Apart from that, it was a great conference. The sessions were fantastic, and I don't think in previous years I've found so many that I wanted to see. Excellent work, guys.

  Posted by: lukewarm_pepper on May 21, 2006 at 07:36 AM

• I forgot to say that I found the registration thing & badge scanning not to be a problem at all, but I know some people did. There didn't seem to be quite enough time between sessions to get everything organised. Some of the queueing was pretty hilarious - could do with people organising where the lines would go before people start arriving.

  Posted by: lukewarm_pepper on May 21, 2006 at 07:39 AM

• 
  I was disappointed that the presentations were not linked more effectively. I went to five Java EE related talks, and they all started out rehashing the same material. B o r i n g.

  I found the Java EE Blueprints talk particularly disappointing. 90% of the talk covered EE5 basics, and only 10% was what could be termed "blueprints", namely advice on how to put this stuff together effectively.

  In contrast, Gavin King's Seam talk worked extremely well for me. He waved at the slides and said "you know all this stuff, and why it sucks". Then he went straight to the heart of the matter and told us what he is doing about it. But I can see how someone who doesn't yet know JSF and EE5 would have found the talk rather meaningless.

  Perhaps it would be possible to post prerequisites, e.g. if you go to TS5678, you really should have been at TS1234 or at least read the slides?

  (BTW, having the slides available before the talks was great.)

  Posted by: cayhorstmann on May 24, 2006 at 08:42 AM

• The SCA/SDO demos didn't work and makes me wonder if specs that aren't proven, shouldn't be demo'd b/c it can give ppl doubts early on. Wi-Fi sucked pretty bad in most areas of Moscone. The presentation done by RIM was very dry and not very well prepared, it felt like a college student presentation.

  Oracle's advanced JSF + ajax approach seemed to push using JSF with "ajax like" capabilities by circumventing the JSF lifecycle. I wish they would have done a presentation on how to integrate JSF and other ajax platforms.

  just mho...

  Posted by: echoi1975 on May 24, 2006 at 09:56 AM

• Wi-Fi Was Terrible wireless internet access was 'ok' if you knew where to stand, but in the sessions, for the most part, it was pretty much non-usable most of the time.Mains Power for those with laptops, options on getting power were few and far between, and almost always non existent in the session rooms.Schedule Builder Sucks particularly since it needs better conflict resolution without having to fiddle around, and a way of indicating that you're interested in a class that's full.lollipops at the end of the line was great for figuring out which line to get into.Hands-On-Labs these were rushed to the point where it was a matter of not really understanding why everything was being done, and just getting to finish the lab before time was up became the objective.

  Posted by: pbelb on May 24, 2006 at 02:10 PM

• Jim,
  If you are interested in the Session Planner we have at the Javalobby site and how it can be Aerith-ised and enhanced with connecting to the original session information for next year drop me a mail at grev (at ) miginfocom (dot) com.

  I have a lot of cool things that can be achieved in not so very long time, with some great and cool useability enhancements.

  Btw, I think the queue lines and pre-registration ended up somewhere between both our estimates. :)

  Cheers,
  Mikael Grev

  Posted by: mgrev on May 24, 2006 at 03:08 PM

• Hi Jim,

  I hear from my marketing team that this year delivered excellent booth traffic and the level of conversations through the pavillion opening hours was of signifcant better quality in terms of leads, networkinig and general feedback to us.

  So - if we can repeat the Pavillion configuration for J1 2007, that would be great!

  Cheers,

  -Jonathan
  B: http://jonathanbruceconnects/jonathan_bruce

  Posted by: jonbruce on May 24, 2006 at 07:58 PM

• I agree that the WiFi was not working very well in some places, and it was dificult to find power.

  
  Labs felt very rushed, one assistant told me "Don't type the code, cut and paste it from the page or you won't make it even halfway through". For me at least, if I don't type it, I won't remember it, and I won't have time to play around and make mistakes, the things that really help me learn. Nice that we got all the labs on CD though. The "building Mustang" lab should be available on the pages where you urge people to participate with solving beginner bugs, today there is only some quite sparse documentation on how to get started.

  
  Lunch was good. Breakfast and snacks were not so good though. For breakfast, how about some more fruits, or whole grain breads and cheese? Some days when I got there, all that was left was glazed donuts and the likes, sugary dessert basically. Same for afternoon snacks, some fruit would have been nice instead of the constant stream of cookies, chips and sugary snacks.

  
  I loved the car racing. More skill based competitions next year and fewer lotteries!

  
  Speaking of which, the only "give away" I was interested in was the bookstore competition where you could win lunch with the Java Puzzlers guys or books if you were there for the drawing. Only ten or so people bothered to show up, so it seemed like there was a very good chance of winning, but the guy who did the drawing went "Ok, that person wasn't here, IS THERE ANYONE FROM COMPANY X HERE?" and gave the prize away to a guy walking past, which I felt was a bit rude to us who had bothered to go there on time. I guess it wasn't you holding that competition, but someone else (A-Press?), but anyway.

  Posted by: larswestergren on May 25, 2006 at 02:11 AM

• How bout scanning your badge instead of using meal tickets?
  

  Posted by: sbowlds on June 05, 2006 at 07:16 AM

• Thanks to everyone -- I've passed on your feedback to the organizing committee.

  Posted by: driscoll on July 10, 2006 at 09:33 AM

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