Foojay Podcast #24: BeJUG, BruJUG, and how Devoxx was born

Transcript

Automatically generated from the audio, so it can contain errors in names and technical terms. Suggest a correction.

[0:00] Hello and welcome to this new edition of the Foojay podcast for the next stop of the virtual Jack World Tour I’m not crossing any borders welcome to Belgium welcome to the Foojay podcast all your news about OpenJDK this Java User Group World Tour has already brought me to a lot of different countries but for this episode I decided to stay at home the Belgian jug started in 1997 and was the birthplace for devox devoxx for kids and fox days and in our Capital Brussels we can join Bluejack since 2010 so there’s a lot we can talk about to learn more about communities and conferences I’m reviewable I’m the manager of the procedure ISO group I have been a freelancer in the JVM ecosystem for nearly 20 years now and so yeah I’m passionate about everything related to IIT team management and so on hey so my name is Stefan Janssen I founded the Belgium Java User Group in 97 the year before I actually started JCS which was a Java consulting company in Belgium and then later on bijuk started organizing events which was Java polis rebranded in 2008 to devops and that’s what I now do part-time is organize devox Belgium yes

[1:21] Hi everyone I’m Tom Coles about 13 years ago I graduated as a high school teacher I felt Too Young at the time was 21 to go into teaching for the rest of life and tell people how the world worked when I didn’t know it myself so I decided to transition into Tech so I studied I.T fell in love with Java in school that my internship at a company called infos report where I still am today and for info support I’m a software consultant Java Community Elite and I’m also a pretty frequent conference speaker at a diverse conferences and I think more important for this conversation is that I co-founded the end for object together with my wife and I’m currently organizing the Belgium Japanese group thank you and I’m Frank the porter technical writer at Azul doing software stuff more than 30 years since I graduated sorry a bit older and also joined a bit of the organization of the Belgian Jack the last year Stefan as the founder of the B Jack can you tell us a bit about its history in 95 I was working for a financial consulting company doing corporate and Retail banking Solutions and I was working in I was living in Australia and

[2:36] Sydney for six months doing a migration of a project there and that’s when I in 96 I started playing with Java in the evening because I had nobody really no family there so I had to do something and that’s where really the spark of writing Java applets and having Duke moving on your browser screen you know that’s where the enthusiasm got to because we didn’t have any animation at that time in browsers and then I came back from Australia and I wanted to meet like-minded people and that’s where I started the Belgium Java User Group in 97 and basically it was a I think I did events every every week in the office of the company I was working at fics it was named and that’s really where I really started networking and finding other people and it also created a platform for me to start my consulting company so I think in 98 I started JCS which was a Java consulting company which grew really rapidly I mean we had like 35 people in 2000 so like two years later or three years later and it became too big so I just decided to sell it because it there’s always this decision point when you reach

[3:53] A certain number of employees is that either you become a full-time shrink sorry a CEO or you pick out or you want to stay a CTO and do technical stuff so I decided to sell the company so I could continue doing technical stuff and it’s actually in that time in 2001 that I then also because I had a bit of financial but offer and that I decided to actually with the Java User Group start a one-day conference which was Java police so you see you started the B Jack was it you organizing everything or did you have a team around you volunteers yeah there were definitely different people that I actually dragged into the journey for sure one person was Data mode he used to work at some Microsystems at that time it’s it’s hard to remember I should really do a lookup of all the different people I know like your veins and there were lots of people that basically were starting to see the same enthusiasm of the potential that Java brought and they basically helped but it was me who put the signature on the visit way the non-profit organization and then really when it’s

[5:01] Turned into a one-day conference I had to actually go into a more legal entity because a lot of people don’t know this but the first three years when I run Java police I was losing a lot of money because I was green behind the ears I had no idea what I was doing and you know if I would not have sold JCS at that time I would have probably stopped after the first edition because my wife was constantly saying like what the hell are you doing you know you’re just losing money so luckily I had that Financial buffer and then after three years it was break even and many many people I don’t want to mention too many names because I will forget so many but there were so many people also involved to joined the program committee the steering committee and it was like this collaboration amongst peers and developer enthusiasts who helped me push it Forward yeah we’ve seen that at the last devops where we had the gathering around what will we do with B Jack and we’ve seen that many people who actually were involved in the first organization were there again Olivia to switch to project so that’s

[6:03] Something you started in 2010 or someone else started it and you got involved it was actually Natasha Carl that started it and at the time I was what Hanselman calls the dark matter of developer so it’s the huge mass of developers which don’t go to conference might not even know which conference are available to them and luckily I noticed a post on LinkedIn I think back then saying if you’re interested in Java let’s have a beer in a bar nearby in Brussels and so I say yeah why not and I went and that was the kickoff sessions of the project and there was Tasha that was explaining what was her vision about when the burjak would would be that it should be a way to share Freedom knowledge as free as possible that to be as inclusive as possible and so I started as a simple intendee and the beginning like like any other community was quite hard because you need to have that critical mass of regular attendees that will bring new peoples and make noise about you even and we were at the time struggling to find good places and good locations where people

[7:27] Would join because it was happening in the evening in Brussels and you know that the traffic conditions in Brussels is quite horrible and so it was a bit of a struggle for us to find at that time I think I had the idea to ask to schools before if they were interested in sponsoring the event by providing a location and I was quite lucky to find a school which was at the center of Brussels basically and that did offer us for the next 10-year location for free when we could welcome our guests and our attendees and that’s how it started I mean I think three years after the Inception I took over because special decided to take a different path and I took over and has been in charge since then something I’ve seen with when talking with all these jux is a lot of them are not organized anymore by the people who started it so it’s really the community who keeps them alive and just keeps them evolving Tom you have a bit of strange story about the Antwerp Jack because you call yourself the king of bad timing that’s why I heard during one of your talks it’s not actually the

[8:45] King of bad timing I usually say the winner of the bad timing Awards so let’s rewind a second I just recovered from a burnout and during my burnout I had a lot of soul searching and I was like okay I can’t keep doing what I was doing before I need to do some things that really give me a lot of energy and what gave me a lot of energy were these community events going through to jugs like Olivia’s Joker was at the bridge quite a few times even spoke there a couple of times and that was the atmosphere the feeling that I wanted to have more of in my life so I decided to found the Antwerp jug now the bad timing comes when I say that I had my burnout and the summer of 2019 and I recovered around February 2020 which is when I made a Twitter profile and yeah let’s say March 2020 was a bit of a are we still going to do this and two months later I think we were like yeah it’s not going to last that long together with my wife he said yeah we’re just going to organize something in May let’s get going let’s do it online and we’ll see we did one event online with Helen Scotland which had I believe no antwerpian people

[9:56] But people from all over the world which was nice in its own sense but not really what we wanted to do and then we had one other event that had Billy corundo from The Oracle team online as a hybrid format and the other speaker yeah I’m looking at him Frank was my other speaker because I when I was watching him online quite doing a few fun things with Raspberry Pi so I was like hey Frank I want someone local because I actually went to have it more local let’s let’s get this going but in the end yeah kovit lasted a bit longer the events didn’t work out that well so was just pure bad timing in a way I guess Stefan also fought conferences that would should have been a nightmare I think but to be honest the first lockdown period I was going like sabbatical you know because it is a bit like Groundhog Day doing a conference like devox I mean every year it’s the same Rhythm and you’re just repeating yourself and that’s what I say to Mark Hazel as well I actually have these golden handcuffs because the community expects you to organize this but after a while you go like well I’ve experienced

[11:09] All the highs and all the lows and it’s really a challenge to still find new exciting speakers or topics or experiences so you need to keep it interesting for the organizer as well and so that’s always a bit of a challenge but like yeah so the first year I was like oh I don’t have to do devops Belgium I can just relax go on holiday no no holidays because you couldn’t go on a plane either so after one year when it’s so I decided not to do devops I didn’t want to do a virtual one we did do a devox Ukraine virtual one and I just had fun developing a platform to do conferences online so at least I could do still do a bit of coding but after the second year I was starting to get really bored and I really wanted to organize it again I mean it was more than enough one year of rest so I was really happy that I could I made me skipped two editions and then last year we were able to do it again our 19th Edition and I was really happy and I even said it on stage during the welcome keynote I think you know you just see what you’re missing when you’re unable to organize it and I think I said

[12:16] Like you know I would love to just keep on organizing it until I dropped that you know ideally on stage like that would be nice just drop dead on stage that would be a nice way to go it would be traumatic traumatic for a lot of attendees so maybe not the best idea but no so I think the whole pandemic just showed me that I really loved doing this and I would love to do this for many years to come I think also the community showed it because your attendees were also waiting for the new conference because the ticket sold out in five minutes that’s crazy in five minutes so we had two luckily we were anticipating this a bit so we had two batches one batch of 2 200 tickets and another batch of 750 tickets the first batch was sold out in five minutes and the second batch in two seconds so that was like hell I mean the first batch when it was out in five minutes we were like really enthusiastic like what the hell is happening but then the phones started to ring and you know then these companies and so on they go like hey I’m a sponsor and I didn’t I had no chance to buy a single ticket and I promised all the

[13:24] Developers in the company they should they could go so like hit the fan very rapidly and in the afternoon the excitement basically turns 180 and then we were like a bit depressed and so luckily we had the second batch so we were able to actually get a bit of those tickets to the sponsors and that’s why a lot of sponsors said okay well if I can’t buy more I’ll have my 1000 developers ready and just refresh when you open the registration and that’s why yeah but we definitely learned from that yeah it could improve your ticketing system indeed and test it was a stress test I think for your system well luckily it was running on kubernetes and we had like four Bots and they barely reached like 40 so scalability with kubernetes for just that amount was not a problem at all I think there’s only one other event I know of an entire Belgium that does that has this amount of ticket sales and that’s Tomorrowland the best Festival in the world probably so without a doubt devox Belgium is the best conference in the world we’re just on that metric and maybe also one of the biggest I think

[14:32] In number of attendees well since this year we’re not the biggest in Bel well no hold on there’s a few angles so from a devops perspective devox France has actually surpassed the fox Belgium they sold out in 13 minutes and they had a total of 3 800 attendees 3 800 people attending all in and next year they’ve added a second level in ballet concrete which is the biggest venue you can have in Paris and they will be able to reach 5 000 people so defox France is the biggest but it’s only three days so we’re still the longest in number of days and it’s for devox France it’s all French and meaning the majority of the attendees are also from France so it’s more a national event and devops Belgium is where an international event but that’s totally fine I mean I don’t have to be the biggest or largest or whatever because you know at kidney polis where we have been organizing devops for the last 22 years I’ve reached the maximum venue since since many years so if you can’t scale vertically I’m on a scale horizontally over all the different Dev boxes and that’s really by Design so kovit had an impact on Antwerp Jack

[15:38] Because he had that really interrupted your startup and it has interrupted the conferences what was the effect for brew Jack in Brussels the effect was small is the same I think we all suffer from the zoom fatigue and there were already a lot of good conference a big conference that started having their online version and they were well more equipped than I was I didn’t have any equipment to do a proper recording and to have attendees all over the world and recording those appropriately so I just decided that it wasn’t worth it to spend efforts and money trying to set up something while there was already all those great contents that were produced online so yeah we just waited for the that the pandemic was over and then we restarted this year basically it’s been a bit harder to restart than I anticipated because one of the many positive aspects of the pandemic was the increase of remote working which means that it had in general greatly increased the work-life balance of many people the downside for drugs and other community events is that there is less people working in Brussels unless computers

[17:05] Which means that it’s a bit more difficult for us to have as many attendees as we used to have I think that’s something we will manage over time and find a new balance yeah people went from work to Jack to home you know they have to go from home to Jack to home again so I think for a lot of people that’s indeed a different approach and I heard from other jugs that they’re indeed struggling to get people back to The Jug I think that also reflects a bit what happened with devox is that a lot of people are working at home and they use like these two days three days events as a team building to get out of your home bubble and actually meet your colleagues in person and have a beer Etc so I think for the events who are taking over multiple days it’s actually better but yeah the meetups in the evening they’re definitely struggling all over the place yeah actually this is a call to action we should do for the jugs because people can come to jugs to really meet people again so not only colleagues but also other people from the community a bit about the history of bijok so you started this Stefan a long

[18:14] Time ago but last year I was I think it was in September I was in Prague visiting my Azul colleagues for the first time there and late in the night I got a call from Tom who said yeah I was on Meetup I wanted to visit to check the status of B Jack and I saw that this Meetup page was open for someone to take it over what should we do with it that was actually the Rebirth of the B Jack together with a session we had at devops Tom can you tell us a bit more about this story yeah of course so actually we have to go back a couple of months before because together with Olivier myself as and verb Jack lead at that time so desperately trying to get that thing going and Renato the leader of the Belgian scholar user group we sent in a virtual Federal session for devops to really like entice people to come on let’s go we can do this we’re back the fox is back the meetups can come back as well and I talked to Stefan as well in a call we had saying hey Stefan how can you help how can devops our B Jack even help us to Kickstart these communities again and I believe Stefan said to me yeah but why are you asking

[19:24] Me what we can do for you why don’t you ask what the jokes can do with B jug and I was really thinking about this and yeah okay okay and then I need one day I open Meetup and what do I see the Big Orange Banner this Meetup is looking for an organizer and I texted Stefan like hey Stefan I don’t know how this happened but if I click this button I’m the new organizer and leader of the Jack right it was like doubting he said yeah just go for it I called you asking like if I’m going to click this button I do not want to be alone in this case I want to keep this going and then I basically reserved Jack and said that evening okay I’m going to be the organizer my main motivation the first time I clicked I want to organize was I do not want The Jug which had 1200 people or something I don’t want that thing on meetup.com to end up in the hands of some recruiter company that will abuse the good name for vital recruiting purposes and lose a lot of the soul of what it means to have a jug so I held on to it eventually a few months forwards we’re at the devops at the buff session

[20:34] We had a few nice people that said oh yeah let’s do this but we really want to do something together we all want to get involved so that’s where we set kind of the vision for the Jug moving forward the vision mainly is anyone can contribute everything is on GitHub we just have an issue list if you want to host an event pick up a task if you want to if you want a new logo this happened recently we said hey I want a new logo for the Chuck and someone from the community just said hey I saw this issue on GitHub I did it here’s a new logo what do you think and it’s the new logo of our Juggernaut so we tried to make it as collaborative and inclusive as possible and the first well I actually quickly realized while being at devops that while I wasn’t quite sure that I was going to organize it in the end I realized that I was actually in the ideal position to do that because I’ve been speaking at conferences so whenever I went to the speaker that’s a bit more famous let’s say I could just walk up to them and say hey do you want to come so actually the buff session was during or right before

[21:35] The speaker dinner and the buff ended I walked straight into the speaker didn’t walk to Ana Maria from the Oracle team and said hey Anna you want to be our first Speaker she said yes and we’ve been going every month since then so that’s about the story so Stefan that the fact that both session at devops re-kicked B jack is not completing the circle sure absolutely and again it’s by Design right I mean devox is there to enable and connect the dots and try to really you know work as a surface to stimulate you know collaboration Etc so for me it was a no-brainer I mean we’ve been doing both sessions for Java user group leaders since many editions I mean in the beginning it was still Oracle basically hosting it where they were really inviting all the jerk leaders at devops for from a European perspective but yeah I mean that’s where that’s why devox is there I mean it’s not only it’s not only knowledge sharing but it’s definitely also allowing people to Network and I think if I would get a dollar from all the companies that got started at devox I mean I would definitely be a rich person but just

[22:48] Just to compliment Tom’s Story I mean I actually decided in 2015 to stop with organizing bijux so I basically passed the torch onto Daniel de Luca temperatures because I wanted to focus on the devox family and also the Vox days initiative because I wanted to really I I’ve been doing Belgium for so many years that I wanted to do the European challenge you know just basically you know getting new opportunities but also new challenges for myself and to be honest in 2015 it was a bit dormant it was they did a few events but they were really not that active and then of course the pandemic happened and then luckily the Meetup expired and Adam saw that this opportunity which is great I mean I can only upload his initiative and you know yeah that I’m really really happy and for sure the circle is round now that I can make it even more complete actually the last event that was organized before well it kind of stopped and then eventually I took over was the devops speaker mentoring event with IBM Steve Pool in Brussels where you were as well Stefan and that was actually the first Speaker event that I

[24:04] Ever went to and that kick-started my speaking career so it’s also because I remember what the B Jack did for me in that event that I recently restarted the speaker training for the B jug and we recently had our first I talked to the Vox Brussel person so let’s stand and I told him hey I have a few new speakers could we get maybe a quickie slot to get these people going now last week oh my heart was just so happy to see one of our attendees that was on the speaker training stand on stage and do a really good presentation and that’s I think what it’s all about enabling people making them better and having a lot of fun with Java in general but definitely is also an important one a couple of UK I went to a session where four speakers who had never presented at a conference before got trained by the London Java user group and they did an amazing job and I really like it touched me emotionally just to see like these people trying to really get into the traveling circus because it is really like that I mean I go to a lot of devoxes and Vox days and you constantly see the same speakers popping up but

[25:14] It’s really really important to get also new speakers into these circuits so we get some new fresh ideas new fresh faces and also the diversity Etc so yeah these initiatives like Bjork is doing and that we’ve been enabling is really important because you have the Rockstar Usual Suspects but we definitely need to have also there’s so many I mean the problem with developers a lot of them are really introverts and they really are afraid in standing in front of an audience but once you are able to make that step you know it’s an eye-opener and it really opens up so many new doors from multiple perspectives yeah and I would like to add to that the person who participated in our speaker event recently what his barrier was he was quite confident he could stand in front of an audience but he thought that his topic wasn’t relevant and his topic was he entered Tech as a more senior person in age not senior as an experience but he called himself a senior Junior developer and he thought oh but this isn’t something that conferences would except and I was like no no you don’t understand this is

[26:20] Exactly the kind of stories that I want to hear at conferences and what was the one of the nicest moments for me last week during Fox Brussels was Ibrahim finished this session and after the session people came to him and asked him questions like how was your journey how can could I do different things a bit differently like it really had an impact and I was just like see told you we need these kind of different perspectives because else it’s like Stefan said that’s usual suspects and sometimes maybe a bit too technical focused well it could be a bit of a broader range all the recordings of fox days Brussels are online I’ve seen also the quickies so let’s add a link to that specific session that you’re talking about so that people can take a look at it olivi has quite some history were you able to introduce new people into speaking with your joke I don’t know if we really had people that were presenting into other events but we definitely organized at least the last three years before the pandemics each year we had a special session for what that we called new blood for first time

[27:31] Speaker where we had sessions of maximum 15 minutes and we had at least four people presenting topics that they were interested in and it had to be somewhat related to Java somewhat related to I.T in general but it could be quite Broad and I would say that it was indeed some of the most interesting sessions we had because the perspective were different because it was topic that we were that were not trending at the moment and that were not already talked over and over so it’s it’s definitely interesting that we have experienced speaker to can explain Technologies and developer Advocates that are promoting the products because people don’t always have other sources of information so it’s always good to have these as an eye opener but it’s also very important for us to give this stage for anyone and that’s what I always tell to anybody who is willing to give a talk because that’s one of the questions when you register to the Meetup is are you interested in giving a talk and for people that say yes well please just send me a mail tell me yes I would like to give a talk it

[28:54] Doesn’t matter if it’s your first time if you’re not confident in having a full session 50 15 minutes of talk we can introduce put you in front of a more experience because we have your first 15 minutes of talks and then the I would not say the main but the more experienced took later on and that’s and we get give you feedback week but at least you have this opportunity you have this stage you have a friendly attendee that are there to support you and so that’s really important for us yes I think that’s an important message if someone thinks about starting to speak that that’s a joke audience is not there to judge you they are really interested they want to see what you want to talk about so people should not be afraid to try it out even as an experienced speaker I usually try to run my since my sessions that a joke because it’s smaller it’s Cozier and I like I did a new talk last week at the utrech Java user group and the amount of feedback I got even small things like you were a bit too fast here you can really interact with people a bit better than you could at a conference plus I

[30:07] Would never send in a new talk to a conference because Stefan will tell you he gets like thousands of abstracts and I think starting at a jug is always a good idea because it gives you time to refine your talk know where the pauses are know what’s interesting to your audience because when I create a new talk I practice it for myself I practice it to my wife until she gets tired of it but then I want to move out in the world and see what do other people think what do they want to hear is it resonating with people and if it isn’t then a jug is a really good place to start and I think a good talk is like good wine it gets better over time you need to really refactor it a bit and practice it and if you do it a couple of times after you know the fifth edition of the fifth iteration of the talk it you nailed it and that’s the moment you should submit it to devox if you’re not a rock star speaker the other thing as well is of course as an organizer we also have a bit of a responsibility to protect the speaker you don’t want to throw a speaker in front of 800 people where you have Dimitris taking photos while you’re

[31:13] Speaking the videos are streamed Etc because it’s also your reputation on the line so you know you do need to have a bit of confidence and have a bit of a track record and like Tom says a Java user group is a perfect ground a perfect basis to actually nurture your talk and your experience in talking definitely already mentioned you moved from devox Belgium to France to voxday so your you’re building an empire of conferences but I also saw that you actually started organizing devops for kids already in 2012. I’m myself I’m involved with go to Dojo which is a bit the same thing so I really love the community thing happening again at these events because they really want to inspire kids to not only start programming but also present work together what was your motivation to start with the four kids it’s actually a nice anecdote is that my son who was 11 years at that time he came to me and said that I want to learn to program I was like you know I fell off my chair first and I said what and so I was like looking around and trying to find resources and well the problem was that the majority of the resources and

[32:28] Again this is 11 years ago were in English there was actually almost no really tutorials for children so I went to him and said like you know what I’ll do I’ll organize a devops for kids just for you and that’s where it started so I organized the devops grid only for him and that basically you know well you know I was already running devops so I have all the contacts Etc and I think we organized it in one of the high schools in Ghent or in godric I can’t remember because we did multiple ones I know Tasha also joined from Brew Jack and she really helped with the now robots where she really introduced the robotics to children and I basically got the old gang from devops like Daniel the Duke I joined and many others and it was a chain reaction I mean a lot of parents had the same city situation where they have children around 10 ish years like Arun Gupta for example and they basically took the brands devoxx for kids and they ran with it and we started a non-profit in Europe one in America one in South Africa and I think it was a three continents and different people basically used the

[33:38] Brand to be published everything online everything was open sourced and it was really crazy it went like like this even at the moment where we had devops for kids at Java one actually at Oracle where we had like 500 children during one day in San Francisco and we’re like bloody hell this was like really touching the sensitive spots but the funny thing was is that then I said like to my son like so are you going to do informatics and you’re like no it’s not for me but at least he tried you know he looked at it and but he actually said like one of the things was like well if I do pro informatics I will just compete with you and everybody will compare me with you and he didn’t want to have that type of competition going I was like damn you know yeah but being a programmer is indeed not the end goal of code devox for kids like if I look at the kids that come from the organization I did some were now game developers some are doing product design and using Arduino in their product design at school so that’s really the thing is learn to work with computers what you can achieve with them and but it’s indeed great at that

[34:46] Initiatives like devops for kids or indeed sharing this content and making it available to everyone and the other thing which I think was the most eye-opening from this whole initiative was that I think about 30 to 35 percent of the children were girls and it really inspired a lot of female attendees to actually go into an informatics because at that age at 10 maybe already but we had younger children as well like even six seven eight and at age they were not yet manipulated by Society in thinking that girls shouldn’t be doing I.T and so it is at that age that you actually had to solve the diversity about the gender problem that we have had in the I.T business and I think it’s getting better I mean definitely also in devoxin in general we see a lot more female speakers doing presentations which like 15 years ago it was mainly dominant male speakers I like to believe that thanks to Koto dojo and devoxx for kids the last 10 years the number of girls in it has been growing I don’t know if it’s only our responsibility but of course not it’s a group effort of course right

[35:58] Today your 25 cent worth of you know added value I’ve seen that most jokes use Meetup to organize their stuff now Stefan with devoxxia it’s a bigger scale you mentioned kubernetes already what kind of Machinery do you have to organize everything as I told you when I installed JCS I really decided to stay as a developer and really play with technology and so for me organizing devox is a luckily all the non-technical things I can delegate to my wife so again Tom you know working with your wife she’s my partner in crime and we’re very complimentary we spoke about that Frank as well at voxlace Brussels she’s totally not technical but it’s a good thing because she would not be there I would have been bankrupt 10 times in a row right because I’m I’m creative and I like doing things with codes but don’t ask me to do accountancy or all those type of things right so that’s that’s rather important and so for me being able to still do developments in a way that it benefits devox is really for me where I get the excitement you know like doing AI r d because I used to do r d at the financial company and so still being

[37:12] Able to do research and development but in function of devops or Fox days that’s where I get the pleasure so building the cfp I mean I’m not the best developer but I’m a very motivated developer so I’m constantly refactoring re-changing and I go to all these events and you learn new things they go all right okay I need to include it in and so after so many iterations it becomes a stable product and so the cfp is really like for me the conference in a box type of tool which devops and Vox laser uses and then we have the registration app which was initiated by celestino who got inspired by devox and I used to I had build a valid application to do registration but it was like really a nightmare to make it compliant to all the different countries and the legal implications of vat Etc and so celestino said like okay you know what I’ll do this and he started alphaio which is an open source registration app really good application and so those two alphaio and the cfp and then of course WordPress as the website those three are basically the corner storms for our software or I call it conference in a box type of software

[38:23] Platform and then people like Casper cools who works at cortrek or sorry In Bruges I think at vivis he wrote the digital signage where we have like the these Chrome bits that go into a screen and then it talks to the cfp and it shows the signage we had other people who were building the Twitter ball and that’s the whole thing I mean like the Twitter wall it’s open source by Sven Peters and his friend and you know people just see it the enthusiasm is there they hack on it they do a buff session and you get these all smart people who love playing with technology like even with Raspberry Pi’s I mean we did Raspberry Pi’s at a certain moments where you had an NFC wristband instead of a bike you had a wristband with NFC and then when you went out of the room you could vote for your talk using a Raspberry Pi NFC voting and go like you know just Geeks having fun with technology and trying to apply it to an event that’s where I get it as you can hear that’s where I get the excitement from one of the most fun sessions I saw was actually when you were looking for some kind of tool or framework to schedule

[39:28] The that to make the schedule of devops and you basically had to competitors on stage like okay you two hash it out and I’ll use whatever comes out of this yeah we had multiple things but we even had like these Bluetooth Peaks were really Hardware devices and we spread it we use like one weekend to go over Antwerp and we spread it all over the place and then we built well not me but Mike Sayers and Peter couterna they builted Android and iOS app to fight the beacons so he had attendees running an Antwerp searching these beacons and it’s like oh man it’s it’s just really having fun with technology and see how you can apply it to an event there’s some Java fix in the mix with the mobile app yeah exactly the mobile app was developed by luong first for Java one and then they were allowed to make it open source and then basically Johann Vos suggested to or I spoke to her envos and we used it for devops so yeah I mean again we’re being creative with technology and trying to apply it and actually a lot of startups have been created based on that like I know like the beacon game was a bullish

[40:39] Company I think Scala IO or some Scala company is called they commercialize that one or even with the NFC wristbands we had played bus which was a startup in Antwerp using it for rock concerts so it’s really nice to see how these ideas because you know you can have many ideas but the execution is of course you know the biggest challenge so I prefer to do r d and quick prototypes and then that’s where I store you need someone who keeps an eye on the money yeah yeah and that’s that should not be me that’s definitely devox didn’t start as devops it was Java pools I think originally there is some history there in the name yeah absolutely I mean Java pool is the name came basically because we were a Java Centric events run by Belgium Java User Group in the beginning of the event and it was happening in kinipolis which we’ve been organizing it for the last 22 years so Java Kini police Java pool is great name so we went for Java police and I think the first 10 years roughly or eight years it was fine because we were like still under the radar of sun Microsystems legal departments but around I think 2006 it

[41:56] Was still some Microsystems they actually saw like oh this Java police event is becoming a bit too big we should knock on the door and see what we can do and they basically hit me with the fact that Java is trademarked and you can’t use a name which is trademark which is definitely fair because if you are a trademark owner you need to protect your mark your trademark otherwise you know it’s it’s you can’t enforce it so it was totally fine I mean okay I had lots of sleepless nights I had nightmares because of this seriously because I was like what will happen and I went to a marketing company in cortrek and they came up with a new name and said javox j a v o x x javox Vox which is voice in Greece Greek I think so the voice of Java developers perfect nice icons and so on so and I remember that we announced it on the Wednesday and then Wednesday evening I immediately got another email from the legal department from Sun Microsystems saying javox is not okay because it’s jav and that’s three letters from java so it’s still too close to the trademark and I went like oh man seriously

[43:11] So I was like really depressed and then I remember Robin mulkers who used to work at IBM I don’t know maybe he still works there he went like that’s okay just say devox instead of javox so the same day in the morning we announced jaffox and in the evening we announced okay because we rounded to defax and we did two x’s because I wanted to have a unique I didn’t want to have any search results on Google so when you entered the Vox with One X there were still some search results but with two x’s there were no search results so that was a clean name which is really great and just to be safe I also registered devox with three access so nobody would create the uncensored version of art so devops.com is protected okay and then since then it did not have any impact on the attendees I mean people knew about the story I mean they even you know they synthesized sympathized with us about the whole scenario I mean I didn’t really play it biblically but people knew that yeah it was a forced thing to by us to do and since then it’s devoxx and I think it’s great you know a unique name a strong

[44:24] Brands and maybe as a follow-up from just while I’m just exciting about this talk is that you know the whole franchise thing happened actually because of Antonio Gonzalez because I wasn’t planning to conquer the world or create an empire where’s my cat she’s like but Antonio he actually came to my place for a weekend and he was running the Paris Java user group at that time and he wanted to do a big event with his Paris Java user group but he knew about my experience where I lost like quite a bit of money the first three years and he said like I don’t have the financial buffer so I can’t afford doing something and after two bottles of wine each of us were drinking a bottle of wine we came like is it and that’s basically where the whole franchise ID started so Paris Jack did the franchise of the devil’s brand and that basically created a whole chain of other new initiatives where either some wanted to Rebrand like Poland was there was a 35 degrees in the past and just by rebranding he doubled the number of attendees he doubled the number of sponsors and so different organizers so

[45:33] There’s a as an opportunity to actually increase their attendance I have this franchise actually work is that you give them the brand name and also the logic behind it all the tools so it’s it’s like McDonald’s I mean I give them the brands but also all the tooling so they use the cfp I host the cfp for them and then I updated on a daily basis the registration they use so and I get a royalty fee based on the revenue that they make so that way I can do this as a full-time job we basically pay my salary yeah and you can keep experimenting at ending and trying out different stuff what would I love to do I mean even if I would not get paid this is what I want to do Yes sounds great what are the future plans for devox personally I think like just repeating what we’re doing and coming up with great talks is it’s more than enough for me so just to be clear I’m not actively looking for other countries or events they actually contact me and say like hey are you interested in collaborating a bit like with Tom as well I mean he reached out to me and I’m more than happy to support him in whatever

[46:39] Whatever way possible and just having fun we’ll see what happens I mean there’s Fox days coming and going because Fox days is this other thing where I think that was Mark Hazel’s ID where people were doing like a devops for kids and then I was like oh this was so much from let’s do the devils are for pickets but like doing a devops for kids for 40 children and doing a devops for 2 000 big children it’s a big big difference so that’s where Fox days came into action and it’s like an incubator where a Java User Group can start with a small event like like we’ve done in Belgium or in many other countries and then maybe grow into a devops like devops Greece has done this year Olivia what are your plans for brew Jack no I’m currently trying to reach some speaker for the next season because I would like it to be more consistent than it was this year also what I would like maybe to try experimenting is see if some people are interesting into some more informal sessions like book reviews and things like that that’s also something I would like to give it a try at least but more broadly speaking

[47:50] I’m also looking for volunteers who would like to help me into maintaining the joke because currently it’s a one-man show I have some friends that helped me hold the doors during the sessions but that’s basically it’s so yeah I’m not looking for sponsor or anything like that but just more enthusiasts are willing to look over for her other speakers maybe give dogs themselves help organizing stuff yeah just normal jug stuff and the same question for B Jack Tom there is a cooperation between Bluejack and bijak because yeah Belgium is not that big so what are the plans there so yeah all the and I talk on occasion so the next event will actually be in Brussels we got Grace janse from the jansea family which Stefan had a nice picture with recently and Emily Zhang from IBM are coming to Brussels in June so that’s not announced yet but it will be on Meetup soon and then in July we have one more event called the Brazil event because we actually have a big big name Bruno Javelin Souza is coming over to Europe and I asked him hey do you want to jump by it’s the Belgian Jack and for

[49:05] Object never got this kind of response when you say it’s the Belgian joke everyone wants to come so that’s a bit of a luxury position we’re in and then it becomes a bit tricky because I’m becoming a father for the first time in August and I have as I said we’ve open sourced The Jug so anyone can host an event or some guidelines as long as you obey the guidelines and anyone can host it so it’s going to be a bit interesting to see if it actually works without me tightly holding the reins but I’m pretty confident we will one of the other events that I’m looking forward to and that actually ties in with what maybe Stefan wants to still say is since we have this speaker training event I know that the devops cfp is opening tomorrow I’m looking at Stefan yeah tomorrow so that’s the first of June because I don’t know when this recording is going up and we’ll actually have a speaker training but then focused on the abstract the previous speaker training was just feeling confident how to speak give some feedback on the general presentation but this one will be specifically about writing an

[50:05] Abstract to help yeah some speakers write abstracts that are not immediately shot down or just contain some some silly mistakes that get filtered out immediately then one thing that I want to point out because it’s something that’s been on my list since day one that I took over there’s actually a other user group called women code be which is a Meetup Group just for women so they can find a group and then stick together because it’s quite daunting as a woman to just go into a pretty male dominated user group and this is kind of a jump start User Group where a bunch of women get together they make friends and then they go to other user groups and I was in contact with one of the leaders of that group and she said oh we actually have an interest in Java but we don’t know where to go and I said excellent let’s collaborate on this so somewhere in October or November we’re going to do a joint event together and bring women code be and the Belgian Java user group together to introduce more people that way so that’s something I’m very very excited about nice a lot to look forward to okay anything you want

[51:15] To add still well just as a promo is this yes the call for papers will open from the 1st of June till mid-july and registrations will open on the 16th of August at nine o’clock sharp and we’ll probably sell out five minutes later as well again but we’ll do two batches so hopefully you’ll be able to get the second batch and the reason why we’re doing it in August is that once we’ve declined and accepted all the speakers people who did not get in as a speaker can still at least try to get a ticket so that’s why we’ve moved registration after the cfp the only downside of doing that is that we also have Community reviews where people can actually review talks and this is also actually interesting like for I know Tom has been doing this already for a couple of times is that as a user group leader you actually see all the talks and speakers passing by which can also give you some type of ideas to invite them if or if not they get selected for devops that they could speak at your Java User Group oh my marvelous plan has just been displayed like this I know also exactly the guys from the

[52:24] Netherlands do the same thing which I’m so that’s why it’s called Community review and having a good cfp proposal is indeed important because I cannot remember the numbers correctly but it was about 700 proposals for 120 talks lost difference no it’s much more proposals for 220 slots but we limit the number of proposals to three proposals per speaker because in the past we did unlimited and then you have like Simon Richard publishing his 20 talks that he can do so it becomes a nightmare of course but yeah you can submit three talks a call for everyone to do that for the next devops and that’s by the way the easiest way to get a ticket absolutely you get a free ticket you come to you’re invited to the dinner Etc so it’s definitely a VIP experience to go to devops for sure if I can add one more thing from the bijic perspective I haven’t discussed this with Stefan yet but I would like to do something around devops like I outside the venue maybe a city tour or something so if anyone has any nice ideas just get in touch I’m pretty sure we’ll list the GitHub page with where people can leave

[53:38] Their ideas or pick up tasks to get in touch and join us it’s so much fun too to guide people around and just have some fun Tom is basically the Chinese volunteer to do the speakers tour in Antwerp and basically we’ve officialized it by via this podcast my wife and unborn child disagree for this year I’m afraid but we’ll see what I can do if you come to April with devox I will do the tour well I mean there are some funny anecdotes but I’ll keep them for the opening keynote this year but I could tell you some stories of speakers why they actually speak at devoxer but that’s that’s for later okay thanks a lot thanks for joining this podcast recording sharing your experience and all the history of the jugs also thank you the listeners of course keep an eye on Foojay for future articles about development and everything related to the Java world