Original LinkedIn post

Last week I had the honor of attending JCrete®; I had heard many great things, and am happy to report they are all true!

#JCrete is an unconference, which means the program is determined by the people there. Anyone can pitch a session, attendees vote on the proposals and the most popular ones are scheduled. A session can be a presentation, but more often are discussions where people can share their thoughts and experience, and help others.

There were lots of interesting sessions on #Java, #AI, and other topics. Some of my favorites were the ones by José Paumard on Virtual Threads and Scoped Values. In this smaller setting, there was room for lots of discussions and sharing. I managed to give José some tips for IntelliJ IDEA which he immediately applied (Did you know you can use the live templates iop and ior for IO.println() and IO.readln()?). At the request of other people in the session, I gave some additional tips at the end. However, demoing them on a Windows machine with a french keyboard turned out to be a bit (too) difficult! 😱 The next day, I held another (actual) demo session, where I managed to show all attendees something about #IntelliJIDEA they didn't know yet, even my colleague 👓 Anton Arhipov! 💪

Another favorite session was the one suggested by Eleftherios Chrysochoidis on code reading, a topic dear to my heart. Lots of interesting things were shared by the people in that session including Thaddeus Müller-Sarnowski, Ina Bumstein, Jakub Łątkiewicz, Lenny Primak, Marharyta Nedzelska.

JCrete is held on the beautiful island of Crete, which means lots of sun and the opportunity to visit lots of beaches. Fortunately, I also had the opportunity to join a trip to the botanical gardens with Gunnar Morling and his family; the gardens were beautiful, and shade and breeze were very welcome. Thanks again!

Many thanks to Heinz Kabutz, the disorganisers Ixchel Ruiz Andres Almiray Dmytro Vyazelenko and others for an unforgettable week! I hope to be back in the future...