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Speaking (again) at GR8Conf EU

This past week I went to Copenhagen for my third GR8Conf EU in a row (and the second one as a speaker) and I also stayed a couple more days sight-seeing the city. These were my favourite sessions:

  • Gradle workshop by Andres Almiray: Andres started the session explaining the basics of Gradle, how it works, the tasks, dependencies,… and at the end we even created a plugin! It was a really nice workshop and I learnt a lot things about Gradle.

  • Panel about the Future of Groovy with Cédric Champeau, Andres Almiray, Guillaume Laforge, Jochen Theodorou and Jenn Strater: There was a debate regarding the future of Groovy because of the recent announcement of Gradle supporting Kotlin as a language for their DSL and encouraging people to use it also for creating plugins once it’s released. There were many questions about Java 9 support, the Groovy Eclipse plugin and how to contribute to the community.

  • Alexa, tell me I’m groovy by Ryan Vanderwerf: In this session Ryan explained the basics of Amazon’s Echo and did some nice demos about how you can develop interesting applications using Groovy and Grails and the Echo.

  • Groovy Puzzlers by Noam Tenne and Baruch Sadogursky: This was pretty much the same session as in Greach a couple of months ago although some puzzlers were new. The session was funny as always and both Baruch and Noam did an excellent job.

Just before the Groovy Puzzlers talk we had the “Greet & Meet” and the traditional GR8Beers, which were great (pun intented!).

After the session I talked to a lot of people and I even played one round of the “The Captain Game”. It’s basically a drinking game in which you need to repeat some sentences and do moves with you hands and feet. If you fail, you need to finish your beer and start again the next round.

This time I did the following talks:

  • Metaprogramming with Groovy: I got good feedback after the talk and a lot of interesting questions during it. I think people liked it. The slides are available at my Slideshare account and the code is on my Github repository.

  • Mum I want to be a Groovy fullstack Developer: Sadly not so many people came to the talk. The problem was that I was against Graeme (talking about GORM) and Danny (talking about Ratpack). In any case, the people liked it. The slides and the code are avaible.

It’s always great going to another Groovy conference because I already knew most of the speakers and it’s easy to find someone to talk to. For example, I was talking to Danny and asking him a lot of questions about Ratpack because we’re going to use it for our new project. He was really kind and help me a lot so now I have a more clear picture of some Ratpack elements.

This conference has been the 7th stop of my #IvánOnTour2016 and now it’s time to take some rest. I think the next one will probably be Codemotion Madrid in November but don’t worry, in the mean time I’m pretty sure I’ll give a talk at Madrid-GUG and even at SpringMadridUG.