9 Highlights from DevCon

Earlier this month Liferay held it's 3rd annual developer conference in Darmstadt, and I was grateful to be able to attend and see old friends, meet new ones, share some of my experiences, and learn a lot from the experts in attendance. We're all stuck behind keyboards and monitors, mobiles and tablets, so it is also nice to get some facetime with those I interact with virtually throughout the year.

Before the exitement fades (and you forget what happened at Oktoberfest) I wanted to share my top 9 highlights (and use it to remind me of the things I've promised you all for next year!)

Talks

I really like to see the non-Liferay talks, and this year was no different. The opening keynote was Tim Ward, CTO from Paremus, and it really drove home for me the benefits to modularity, clearly a big theme in Liferay 7. But there were others. Jens from Prodyna talked at length about scripting, one of my favorite Liferay pastimes. Jan from ACA-IT talked about AngularJS and knocked his first ever talk out of the Darmstadtium. Willem on SAML. Peter on mass Sharepoint migration, Aleš on portal frameworks we all know and love (most of the time). See the recap site for videos and slides!

Eduardo's talk and the official launch of Launchpad made my SMS/Liferay digital transformation demo look like those BASIC programs I used to type in from Byte Magazine. Launchpad is a perfect solution to the complexities of a secure, fast, and reliable web API with which to drive all sorts of devices. Although Liferay's Expando and Service Builder features have served me (and many others) well, Launchpad is a huge step forward for integration of apps, devices, and pretty much any place your users interact with your business. And it's super easy to create new services. Sign up for the dev preview. You know you want to!

Live Polling

One of the new features we added this year in the event app was "Live Polling" - the ability for presenters to ask the audience to answer questions related to their talk, to really engage the audience (I've seen this at other events and am always very interested in what others think - especially when the results do not match what the presenter was expecting :)). Anabel and I got to sit in the Darmstadtium control room high above the audience to control the polling from behind the scenes during LPSF. That was quite fascinating and the app+live results worked really well. So if you want to use this in your upcoming presentation at a Liferay event, let me know!

Community Meetup

The community meetup was once again held at Braustüb'l, and once again proved to have some very interesting moments. Chris had this to say. And I even got to wear the unofficial Liferay DevCon Community Meetup coat while hanging out with a room full of happy Liferay experts doing everything except talking about Liferay projects!

Spam

The morning of my Community Update talk, I awoke to find about 300 spam posts on our forum. I was like "Umm, slide 5 in my talk was where I talked about how we solved the Spam Crisis back in July". So I spent the morning clicking and cleaning, and the rest of the week discussing with the moderator team how best to prevent it in the future. I think we have it under control now, and I see it as a positive thing - not only is our community so popular that spammers want in on the fun, we are also learning what works and does not work in spam prevention. So it's a win-win!

Oktoberfest

Unquestionably the thing that will stick in my mind was the opening ceremony of DevCon Oktoberfest in the traditional Bavarian way. I was honored to be chosen to partake in this important historical event! So I get up on stage, don the apron, and am handed a giant hulk-like wooden hammer and wooden tap and am told where to start smashing. About 15 hulk smashes later, there's no beer, and on the 16th the entire tap explodes in shards of oak splinters much to the surprise of Olaf, the beermeister, and the audience! We both stood there and had no idea what to do - did I break Oktoberfest? Will this go down as the worst performance ever? (No, it won't). Then, from offstage, another tap suspiciously appeared and then success! Oktoberfest was on!

Although I didn't win any of the Oktoberfest games (and in fact I am particularly terrible at Sjoelen), I did do rather well at Ancud IT's hammer and nails challenge!

Unconference

I was a little sad I only made it half of the unconference due to other duties at the event - it's one of my favorite parts of DevCon, because it's unscripted and really tells you what people are thinking, face to face. I'm gonna try to avoid that next time!

I was still able to attend a few sessions, most notably the "how to use IntelliJ better" discussion, the "Command Line Tools" discussion, and proposed a community workflows discussion which ended up focusing on our community localizations, which are going to be changing along with the modularity changes in Liferay 7. More on this later.

My EU Credit Card Excitement

As an American, I am usually handicapped when it comes to using credit cards in Europe. This year, I intended to put a stop to it, because I hate carrying cash. After 3 applications and a $25 fee (and having to fax something... I know, yuck, right?), I joined the United Nations Federal Credit Union, and was able to obtain their chipped Visa Azure credit card. Big deal, everyone has them now, right?

No, not right. There are three different kinds of EMV chip situations - "Chip and Signature", "Chip and PIN (online)", and "Chip and PIN (offline)". Only one of these methods works at automated kiosks (e.g. train station ticket machines). And most if not all of the US banks issuing new cards these days are only issuing "Chip and Signature" - meaning, it requires your signature (like anyone actually verifies it), and it won't work at automated kiosks since there is no PIN. So while I am happily dipping-and-PINning, my American friends are busy staring at a handful of weird coins.

I ended up not getting a chance to use it in Germany, but was finally rewarded in Spain by insisting I pay for lunch! There was a moment where we weren't sure it would go - the waiter was staring at the machine for an unusually long time. But finally, éxito!!! It could have been 1000€ and I would have not noticed until the end of the month :)

Olaf's agenda hack

Last year I mentioned that the data that the mobile event app uses was open to everyone for hacks. This year, Olaf as emcee and official German DevCon Rule Enforcer wanted an automated way to keep speakers within their alotted time. Instead of the usual person in the back of the room with colored cards showing time left, Olaf hacked up one of the most useful elements of all of DevCon - an automated countdown clock on stage that showed you exactly how much time you had left, in big bold lettering, driven and automated by the same official agenda that drives the website and mobile app. I've seen events that go off the rails in terms of schedule, and it's not pretty, so I thought this was a great way to keep everyone on schedule. I hope all our events use it in the future!

The spirit of community is alive and well

Being a remote employee, normally my day-to-day consists of a mix of heads-down work and interacting with a handful of people inside and outside of Liferay, whether it's on forums, blogs, IRC, skype, slack, hangouts, or other channels. But at DevCon I get to meet the "long tail" - those that I don't talk to on a regular basis, those that are working on and around Liferay making cool stuff. And what I saw this year was different than before - less "will it work" and more "it's working and I want to do more now". I was also approached by (instead of having to beg) people that wanted to contribute back - code, forum staff, and more. If you want to get involved, check out the Activities page for more options on how you can get involved!

I look forward to DevCon 2016! And now for the flight home...

(@_pier and @MariuzzoMauro - What are they dreaming of?)

Blogs
Cool feedback! Thanks for keeping the memory alive... It was a great event meeting the Liferay community.