Java Forum Stuttgart 2019: Conference report & my talk

The Conference

The Java Forum Stuttgart is the biggest Java conference in the South-West of Germany. This year, it took place on July 4th. I gave a talk myself (see below) and attended six talks, too.

The conference had seven tracks with seven talks each. All talks were in German, and nearly all slides are, too. The slides are embedded in the list of presentations. I liked the last talk I saw best: It explained reactive programming as the “best implementation of the Observer pattern.”

More than forty companies had a booth. And I guess all of them tried to hire Java developers. It is a good time to be a Java developer, indeed! 🤗

It was my forth Java Forum Stuttgart. As usual, it was well-organized, with many breaks for conversation and great food. Given that I’m about to move to the U.K., I’m not sure if I can attend next year, but I’d really like to!

My Talk

I gave my German talk “When using the application generator JHipster is worth it — and when not” first thing in the morning at 8:45 (the talk and slides are both in German). I had four parts of live coding in there. All went well until I heard that I had just one minute to wrap up — and about ten slides left, including the ones that actually spelled out when JHipster is worth it and when not! 😱 I raced through my slides to sum things up briefly and show the slide with the link to my slides. So, how did that happen?

In my dry-runs before the conference, my talk took 37 minutes consistently from start to finish. I lost some time by starting a bit late and through the introduction, but not a lot. So I guess I must have talked longer in certain parts than others. Now then, where was my presentation timer, warning me of impending doom?! Since I stopped my slide show for the live coding, I had no overall presentation timer on my computer. The table was too small for my iPad with a timer, and I forgot to start a timer on my watch…

As they say, you can make any mistake, but only once. So I’ll have at least two presentation timers from here on out and make my talks shorter!