Conference Report: LJC Unconference 2020

The Venue

The London Java Community (LJC) hosts an unconference every December. I was there last year and really enjoyed it. So how do you do such a conference during a pandemic? With Zoom, of course!

Zoom’s got the break-out rooms we needed for the session. And what the organizers really liked: They could close these break-out rooms. So this brought everybody back into the virtual hallway in no time! 😁

How did we know what sessions we should do? We used Mentimeter to let people pick the topic. A free account gives you two questions per talk, which was plenty for this conference.

The Schedule

We got two keynotes:

• First, Ben Evans talked about Java 14-17.
• Then Martijn Verburg talked introduced AdoptOpenJDK.

Then we had three rounds of four sessions each. I believe these were the topics in the first round:

• Latest Java 15/16 Content etc.
• Working Remote
• Implementing Real DevOps Culture and/or SRE Practices
• Advent of Code - Hackathon now

Here’s the second round:

• JVM Performance
• Conference Speaking/Developer Advocacy/Career Growth
• “Agfall”: Worst/Best of Agile + Worst/Best of Waterfall in Big Organisations
• GitHub Actions

And this was the final round:

• Kubernetes
• How to Build Web, Mobile & Desktop Front-Ends Today?
• Quarkus/GraalVM
• Kafka

Videos

I believe the entire event was recorded. But I don’t know if and how the videos will show up on YouTube. If they do, then it will be on the LJC YouTube channel.

Thank You, Organizers!

That’s Steve Pool from Red Hat and Dominique Carlo & Barry Cranford from RecWorks. Without you, events like this wouldn’t be possible!