01 August 2016

This was my first time attending GR8Conf and had a wonderful time and definitely it was a great experience. As I mentioned to a few guys, I always wanted to attend but the circumstances were not appropriate on previous years but finally I did it!

The workshops

In the morning I went to the “Getting Started With Grails 3” workshop by Jeff Scott Brown. This session covered all the fundamentals of the framework, probably better as an introduction to developers not familiar with the framework but Jeff also included tips and tricks for developers with experience.

In the afternoon I attended Jeff Brown’s “REST With Grails 3” workshop. He explained Grails capabilities to build RESTful services with a small amount of code, explained the content negotation and more. The best part was his introduction to JSON views (more to come).

The talks

Graeme Rocher kicked off the first day of talks with a keynote detailing the current state of Grails and the future, which is very exciting! He talked about all the new cool features in Grails 3.2: GORM 6 Suite which includes RxGORM, AngularJS 1.0 Scaffolding and JSON Views 1.1. I can't describe how excited I was when I saw all these cool features, Grails is a solid framework and evolving very fast thanks to the hard work of the OCI team and the community.

During the first day I attended to the following talks:

By the end of the day, Ken Kousen talk about the experiences as a Groovy Developer in the Java World. Believe me, this talk was so energizing, thanks Ken for remember us how awesome are the groovy based technologies and this community. Oh yes, don't forget to use Kotlin (just kidding)

After that we headed to the Object Partners Meet & Greet where I had the opportunity to talk with very nice guys doing some cool stuff. It's funny because I live in Los Angeles and I never had the chance to meet Joshua Tuberville from VirtualTourist, cool guy.

Of course we had the Groovy Puzzles hosted by Baruch (@jbaruch) and his especial guest Daniel Woods (@danveloper). As you can imagine they had great groovy puzzles and drinking rules. At the end, Daniel gave away two copies of his book "Learning Ratpack". If you don't have this book I encourage you to buy it. Not only because of the great quality of the book, but also because all the royalties will be donated to the GR8Ladies.

The second day was great too:

To close this awesome conference, John Engelman (@johnrengelman) gave the talk "Writing Software in the Age of Agile: Microservices, Cloud, Containers, & DevOps". He talked about new technologies and ideas that help to refine that it means to develop software in an agile environment and making a lot of emphasis in doing things faster with high quality. It was a great talk, specially if you care about the whole SDLC and the quality of your work on a daily basis.

As a special recording, Ken Kousen and Baruch recorded the Groovy Podcast live from GR8Conf. If you haven't watched it do it now! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWRWnKfbnIs

After that we headed to Gr8Ladies & Gr8Allies Networking Meetup to have some appetizers and drinks. I really enjoyed this networking event.

To finalize

During the conference I had the opportunity and time to talk about software and everyday life with very talented and interesting people: Craig Burke (@craigburke1), Søren Berg Glasius (@sbglasius), Daniel Woods (@danveloper), Jenn Strater (@codeJENNerator), Puneet Behl (@puneetbhl), Ken (@kktec), Ken Kousen (@kenkousen), Burt Beckwith (@burtbeckwith), Baruch Sadogursky (@jbaruch), Steve Pember (@svpember), Danny Hyun (@Lspacewalker), Marcin Erdmann (@marcinerdmann), Ryan Vanderwerf (@RyanVanderwerf), Kyle Boon (@kyleboon), John Engelman (@johnrengelman), Jeff Warren (@jekewa), Joshua Tuberville (@jtuberville), Aaron Zirbes (@Zirbes), Shaun Jurgemeyer (@sjurgemeyer) and so many others (btw you should follow them on Twitter)

I would like to thank the GR8Conf US organizers for such a wonderful job! Overall GR8Conf US 2016 was a fantastic conference, and I’m already looking forward to attending Gr8Conf 2017!

Also, special thanks to Jenn Strater (@codeJENNerator) for all your help and support before and during the conference, I really appreciate it! Congrats again on your next adventure in Denmark and looking forward to meet again.

I had a great time. I think everyone knows that the Groovy community is full of talented people, they are great human beings, kind and friendly... Software is a passion that drives everyone but there is more than that and I'm looking forward to contribute back to it and see them again soon.