What makes for a good JavaOne submission
For some inexplicable reason, I’m one of the external reviewers for this year’s JavaOne EE and Web tracks. The one thing that’s utterly perplexing about it is the dire quality of some submissions.
Tempting as it might be, I’m not going to name names. I’m not going to point out how many vendors pitches there are, or how much they suck. Instead I’m going to try and understand what on earth some submitters were thinking.
For vendors, honestly, what were you thinking? Do you think the people reviewing these things are stupid? Do you really think that JavaOne attendees love to hear about how you solved problem X using your own technology, that nobody can actually use without dropping trow, bending over, and paying for the privilege of being molestered?
The open source crap is just as bad. Here’s a hint to you budding open source wankstains. If your project doesn’t have a community, has no buzz around it, and is not particularly innovative, then don’t bother. JavaOne isn’t some whore you can throw your dirty papers at for a quick show and tell. Nor is it a venue for you to idly gaze into your navel and pick out lint in public, musing on its quantity, quality, and what possible use it might have.
Of course, some of the submitters are savvy to this culling process, and it’s obvious that they’re working hard to try and make the proposal not sound like a product pitch. Unluckily for you though, the reviewers actually do know what’s going on in Javaland, and all of them have attended other conferences and know who has talked about what, and how successfully. So be careful, one misplaced vendor pitch could ruin your chances at playing with the big boys.
I don’t understand how hard it can be to put yourself in the shoes of the average attendee. The goal of this conference (and ANY good conference) is to help said user, NOT to help the vendor or presenter. The fact that you get to strut your stuff and waggle your genitalia at a few hundred people at a time is its own reward.
So given that the average reader here is a discerning (if somewhat mentally unfit) Java type person, with one finger on the pulse of the community, and another firmly in an orifice, I’d like to you know what you think. What would make a good talk? What talks have you gone to that sucked so much you wanted to shove Gavin Fleury, 3 TDD zealots, and a Websphere consultant into a blender and smear yourself with the resulting goop while making sweet manlove to Howard Lewis Ship’s beard?
On and before I forget, HAHAHA VIRTUAS IS OUT OF BUSINESS!!!! TOLD YOU SO!
January 26th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
Since you are the screener, does this mean that this year’s JavaOne will not be a JSF love fest?
January 27th, 2007 at 12:47 am
Hani,
How is that in the entire Java world, including people working on open source project’s I’ve started, you’re the only one who can get my name spelled right?
January 27th, 2007 at 10:35 am
JavaOne 2007 – “In case you missed last year!”
I’m beginning to wonder if there’s going to be anything exciting this year, or if it’s going to be a series of repeat sessions from last year? JEE 5 was exciting, but many of the new innovations and JSRs are intelligently waiting on baited breath for what’s coming in JSE 7– closures and properties? Innovations like that can dramatically change the way APIs are presented, the same thing happened with JSE 5 and annotations. Unfortunately some of our favorite specs (*cough* JSF *cough*) never jumped on the annotation bandwagon with a pure maintenance release for JEE 5. I’d like to see some ramp up in the JCP before JavaOne– maybe have JSE 7 ‘finalize’ its feature set so the stagnant JCP can pick up in activity again.
January 27th, 2007 at 11:22 am
I’ve not even bothered this year to submit to JavaOne, nor can I see myself bothering to attend. Its turned into a turgid developer fest where the “coolest” gadget or yet another brand new framework is lauded up.
What I’d like to see is more presentations about genuine projects, what worked, what didn’t and what was learnt. I’d like to see more around the actual architecting of Java solutions not the “pick this library and you’ll be 1337″ crap that it has been for the last 3 years.
The problem is that as with Java SE 6 there has been a clear decision that the most important thing is to make the fan-boy crowd happy and the billion dollar enterprise market can go hang.
Too many of the presentations, and the BoFs are now just presentations anyway, are just slide packs that you’d be better of reading from the website.
So for you Hani… throw out EVERY Webframe work submission, every OSS project with 2 committers and have 1 presentation on EJB 3, 1 presentation on Java EE 5 and a application server death match competition with real knives.
Java EE in paticular should be about enterprise projects, and not about the latest libraries in Java EE 5.
January 28th, 2007 at 4:50 am
Come on, Hani, 80% of usual JavaOne presentation comes from vendors and sponsors… ado you really want to exclude them?
Or, maybe, you’re just selecting presentations for the remaining 20%?
January 28th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
You have been watching “Will it blend?” :)
January 29th, 2007 at 2:05 am
Since you asked…The perfect recipe for a talk (for me personally) would be hearing:
-) Things I didn’t know already
-) Interesting/good things I didn’t know already
-) Things I can apply to whatever I’m doing development wise today
Yeah. Stuff like that. And anything with bunnies being pulled out of hats.
January 30th, 2007 at 10:36 pm
Anytime I read about the demise of an open source company, I wonder about the long term viability of what we do. OpenSource is great, but if a viable business can’t be established, then what’s the point?
We all know about your homo-erotic fascination with Matt Raible’s Penis, and it’s obvious that you are just over compensating to try to hide it.
January 31st, 2007 at 6:47 am
Hi Hani,
>> “Do you really think that JavaOne attendees love to hear about how you solved problem X using your own technology, that nobody can actually use without dropping trow, bending over, and paying for the privilege of being molestered?”
Ouch!!! Would you not agree that some products actually do a pretty good job at explaining some of the concepts in (possibly tiresome) specifications and standards – ITIL.
It is extremely hard to talk about change, incident and problem management without some clues to what this actually means in practice. The same can be said for performance management where we can have many different types of levels of management ( monitoring, profiling, tracing) with difference focuses and approaches from vendors. Transaction analysis well that is even harder to explain without some real world application examples and a tool that visualizes the important data. I think it is always good to have some kind of q demo during a technical session but with less of the sales jargon – “our patented bytecode dynamic instrumentation thingy….”
Some of us do have pride it the way we have tried to tackle software engineering problems. You should always look at who is giving the presentation. If it is the sales director then you know what type of session it is.
Kind regards,
William
February 14th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
I think that last comment probably sounds a lot like the intro blurbs on the proposals you reject, right? Come on, it’s true.
“It is extremely hard to talk about change, incident and problem management ”
. . . next
February 15th, 2007 at 3:59 am
That is actually my point!!!!!
Developers do need to understand the language of operations (IT management) but putting up a few slides mentioning just this is going to send most developers to sleep. The only way to keep them awake is to show how this all fits together and what kind of activities they need to perform to make life easier for themselves.
Thanks for proving my point.
William
February 20th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
I want to hear about project failures, poor architectural decisions, the worst 10 features of common application servers, lack of due diligence and governance rounded off with endless case studies of commons logging class loading cock ups in clustered environments.
February 21st, 2007 at 3:07 pm
[quote: I want to hear about project failures, poor architectural decisions, the worst 10 features of common application servers,]
As from the other posts, you should have been there the last few years :)
The subject would be something else, but the content could be what you were looking for…