Last week I was in London to speak at the Groovy & Grails eXchange (GGX) conference. It’s one of the three main conferences (with Greach and GR8Conf) in Europe about the Groovy language and all the tools, libraries and frameworks created around it.
I’ve submited three different talks and four weeks ago they notified me that one of them was accepted.
The title of the talk was Grails and the real-time world and it was about how to create a loosely coupled Grails application using Spring Integration as the glue for all the components.
The idea was to create an application easy to develop, evolve and test thanks to Spring Integration and also connect this application to external systems such as the filesystem, a frontend using websockets or a xmpp server in a decoupled way.
The talk was scheduled for the second day of the conference just before lunch, so the first day I really enjoyed the talks but the second day I was getting a bit nervous.
I practiced the talk a lot because it’s very important to me to be confident with the slides and memorize them. I had a 45 minutes slot and, as I did in my previous conference at the GeeCON in Prague I had a small cheat-sheet with the times for the main slides. This time I went faster than usual and finished the talk and the demos in only 35 minutes. Hopefully it went very well and I think the people liked the talk. At least that was what they said via twitter:
And of course, I couldn’t miss my #SpeakerSelfie because of @danveloper.
The slides are available in my slideshare account and you can find the code in my github account.
Also, the video is already available here. Kudos to Skills Matter for uploading it in less than an hour after the talk.
It was my second time attending this conference. The first time was two years ago but I was an attendee instead of a speaker.
And about the talks, this year has been strange because the second day there was only one track for talks and the other track was an all-day hackathon. I don’t know how many people developed things during the hackathon but I tend to think it might be better to have two parallel track with talks.
The best talk for me was Graeme’s talk about the new Grails 3.0 version. He did a live coding session showing us all the new features and the important things. He also mentioned that they’re planning to release the first milestone in January 2015!.
And finally I also spoke to many people and old friends and recruited some of them to speak at the next Greach edition.
With this talk I unlocked the personal achievement of speaking at one of the main Groovy conferences in Europe. I’ve also submitted some talks for the next edition of GR8Conf in Copenhagen, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed 😛