The word most used was open, specially by Sun, trying to
push OpenJDK, OpenSolaris and all their other open projects.
The openness of the conference made my head go around. That’s
related to the second most used word that was…. community.
Interesting how all the big companies talk about their communities,
in which most (all?) of the people is paid by them. Two examples, the Redmonk Unconference celebrated the day previous to the conference in
the CommunityOne section, first you have to register, then they don’t
let some people in because problems with the card readers. Second,
the servlet talk from Sun where they revealed their road map for 3.0
while the some
other members of the expert group saw it there for first time.

Besides the political movements, there were some interesting
discussions about community (again), open source and repositories at
the Unconference, that I think it was the only educative
session I went to. I don’t mean that’s the only worth, I mean it’s
the only I went to 😉 We ended at the Thirsty Bear to continue the
evangelization, and the usual (and some new) jokes about the
new company name while drinking Albari–o
from home!

Tuesday was marked at the booth by an avalanche of people to get
the stamp for the Eclipse Foundation t-shirt, people really fought
for it. Hani decided to come by the booth so I told Dave to attack
and that’s why we ended
being evil, although not individually ;). The day ended at the
Tangosol party, some kind of bachelor party after their marriage with
Oracle. After a short stop in the Irish pub for some shots the day
almost goes completely wrong for listening to some guy Club
suggestions’, that we decided to ignore and return to the hotel for
security reasons after getting there and see the people lining.

Wednesday, well, I have some gaps in my memory, I know for sure we
went to the Eclipse party, although it looked more like an Apache
party, followed by the Google party at the W hotel where things
started to go wrong. We managed to pass the Google Engineering Filter
(TM), or what it’s the same, the Google engineer playing doorman. Get
a job at Google to end at the door of a party, too sad. Even more
jokes about our
new name, including domain registrations (what is the limit for a
geek party?), and some serious conversations with Lauren (as serious as they could be given the circumstances)
including some French practice.

After enough beer and wine we made the move for more serious
drinks to the House of Shields, while somebody of our team (don’t
ask names please) was offered a wheelchair by the hotel staff given
his conditions as we would know the following day. At the next bar I
could practice the few Russian words I know (why wouldn’t I have
listened more carefully when I was learning them!). One of the top
moments was when Dan
Nipplehouse was randomly bitten by some drunk girl in a place
that you’ll have to imagine. What he forgot to say is that he bit her
back in the same place.

Thursday, well, let’s go to the interesting part, after a short
stop in the Thirsty Bear enjoying Spanish wine and paella and trying
to stop Debbie from stealing
my jacket, which by the way was a great success among with the gold
shoes. We were convinced to move to another place where the
Cenqua guys were having dinner… and some more fun. As Matt
wrote:

“To protect the innocent, and perhaps not so innocent, I
won’t go into too much details about who we managed to drag along.
Let’s just say it involved a little obfuscation. There were some
abstractions in the design that definitely did not
leak, no matter how hard we looked.”

Which basically means that the Cenqua guys have some kind of
visual problem, or a strange taste. Well, the Cenqua guys and
Bileblog Hani, target of very embarrassing pictures, and who lost
200$ in a bet with us and will be donated to a charity of his choice.
After the unnameable place we move on to the Starlight room at the
top of the Sir Francis Drake hotel, were some random guys recognized
or very famous Sebastian
and more drinks followed until we were kicked out. Gregor
offered to continue the party on his place but it seemed wise to call
the night before getting in front of his camera. Unfortunately James
wasn’t wise enough.

At the end, the usual suspects as last year, with the exception of
the Spring guys, maybe they
were too busy counting money ;). Somebody said, there are
thousands of people in this conference, but no more than 200 that
really matter. And I would add, from those 200 you get the most
networking opportunities after the conference, at the bar. Good to
meet you all, it was fun!

I’ll be at JavaOne next week in San Francisco, starting Monday at Redmonk Unconference, and through the week around the DevZuz booth or in any of the parties.

I may blog if I have the time, but it’s pretty likely that the preferred communication method this time it’s going to be twitter, with all these crazy people using it, how sad is that? But not at the bar, that’s for sure, there the only option will be face to face.