My favorite heroes of each JavaOne are the Duarte folks. The typical cycle for J1 speakers starts early in the year and there are multiple deadlines through that cycle, but the one deadline that can't be missed is the presentation itself! That means that just before that presentation we all go through the Room 140 - the speaker ready room - to be sure that the presentation looks good, and, more often than what we want, to do the last minute tweaks.

Room 140 is Duarte's room, but their job starts earlier. They take our presentations and make our formatting and images look good and consistent. Then we arrive to Moscone and go to 140 and check how things look like... and what the lawyers did to our text. So we go and work with Duarte to somehow rewrite all those "Java(tm) technology..." back into sensibly sized bullets. And also to add the last minute announcements and must-do changes. Which somehow they do, most of the time without getting upset with us.

They are behind the scenes but they have saved me time and time again doing those last minute changes to my presentation. A cheer for them!