Foojay Podcast #42: Jozi-JUG and Cape Town Java Community

Transcript

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[0:00] Hello and welcome to this new edition of the Foojay podcast today I’m traveling from Belgium to the other side of the world but still crossing only one time zone to arrive in South Africa welcome to the f j podcast all your news about OpenJDK once a month in this podcast we talk about the history of a yava user group and the people behind it today we are traveling to Cape Town in Johannesburg to learn more about this Java communities hello guys I’m Steven and I am the coordinator of the cap town Java user group and from here in cap town we normally do one one event every month and yeah I enjoy sharing knowledge with other developers and also making connections as well I’m Corel dupy I’m the sole organizer of The joosy Jug at the moment Josie is a let’s call it a nickname for Johannesburg and we actually started The Jug in I think it was late 2007 getting together in a coffee shop or restaurant a small group of people and event eventally hitting meetings up to 100 people at a time U monthly and but Co has thrown a spanner in the works of get together

[1:46] But that’s something we elaborate on later I’ve been using or let’s say involved or following Java from the very start and in 1998 I felt it was approaching maturity for what we needed to build applications and my first application went into production in early 9 at a large internet national banking group in London serving 1500 users using a tomcat and an applet and a web app and leveraging an existing systems back end and we built other parts as part of that project that’s actually still in production today so I can attest to the longevity of java and I’ve been involved in various projects contributing bits of pieces here and there and during Co I decided why shouldn’t I be doing the job that I absolutely would love to have and I made a list and sent out my CV and I got an offer from number one and I’m working for the spring team at the moment as part of VMware now VMware by broadcom we’ve just been acquired and I’m enjoying it very much mhm and I’m

[4:00] Frank creator of this podcast for Foojay the friends of OpenJDK partially involved also in the BJ the Belgium ju so I’m doing this podcast also to learn myself how to organize JS and be a better Java Community member so I live in Belgium you live in South Africa here it’s snowing which doesn’t happen lot in Belgium so what’s weather like what’s what should I know about South Africa at this moment well we in Johannesburg we have what would be deemed as relatively mild weather because the we only go below zero a few days a year and that’s usually in July and we rarely go above 35 c that actually happened quite a lot in November and December so it’s it has been changing Johannesburg is 1,600 m above sea level which is it’s on the top list of metropolitan areas at a high altitude which brings a with it interesting problems like air quality measures has to be different and we have none so a lot of people suffer with allergies and stuff and I think air quality impacts a lot of people and they don’t even think about it but South Africa is a country full

[5:39] Of very generous loving people in spite of what you might read or see I think the average South African is loving and generous and very welcoming when I speak to tourists who’ve whove who’ve been here they all say the same thing they feel welcome and it’s a country with a lot of variation I mean Belgium is very homogeneous in terms of geography and population but South Africa we have desert we have rainforest we have Savannah we have something of everything we have a long coastline yeah it’s a very interesting place but Belgium is only 300 kilometers across and I just checked there’s 1500 1400 kilometers between Johannesburg and Cape Town Town yeah so how is the situation in Cape Town how yeah so Steve tell us so cap town I would say is where the life is the people in JC they don’t really have much of a life I’m joking I would say the difference is like in job from my experience job is more business based as and there’s more industry people are pushing hustling and all those kind of

[7:27] Things whereas town it’s a bit relaxed so here we have activities that we do we can go hiking the Table Mountain which used to be I think one of the Seven Wonders I’m not sure if it’s still there but I think that list changes yeah so we do have t mountain we have also the coastal line so like on a daytoday basis you can after work some people go for surfing depending on which year of which season you are in so normally here we have I think it’s the Mediterranean climate where we receive our rainfall in Winter and then our summer is dry which I like that part because I wouldn’t like to go to the beach and then you get rained upart so at least during summer it’s dry people then go out but also in terms of the temperatures February is like our hottest month but also I think due to global warming we have started seeing temperatures going up like today it’s like 37 according to the weather they’re saying we’re going to reach 37 so and still we still have February to come so I don’t know how hot it’s going to become but I think it’s different to job because this is a

[9:03] Coastline so there’s a little bit of a breeze so though the temperature might be hot but at least there’s a balance of the CBR that you get so I would say in a naturel yeah that’s cap town we have more things to explore you feel at home you get to see nature when you are around cap town and there other activities as well that you can do so yeah I think that’s about it so at the moment we have more than 40 degrees difference between where I am and you are I’ve got a little anecdote so in 1993 I was I had developed a C++ training course MH and I was presenting it in various places and I got to do one in Cape Town mhm so now this was a week course and the first day everybody was adamant that we have to arrange the schedule so that they needed to leave by 3:00 because half of them wanted to go surfing and then I said but then we’ll have to start at 8 and they wouldn’t budge and I said well it’s we’ll have to then off lunchtime and I would no we’re not going to have lunch time either so it was an interesting experience but yeah I would agree

[10:38] With Steve’s assessment that’s a it’s it’s it’s a bit more laidback a few years later I was doing a project and we with Hardware involved and we needed to a certain kind of component and we my colleague who was the hardware engineer took out the book with all the component specs and the stamp for the local distributor was actually showed the head office is in Cape toown so he said oh they right here we’ll be able to get sorted quickly and the one person who was there he’s actually was the Guy usually involved in sourcing hardware and he said no I’ll phone joerg and you can phone head office and he found the guy found joerg he got his contact the guy got in his car he drove to joerg the international airports handed them a package and said get it on a plane I’ll have somebody go and pick it up at the airport in Cape Town and they sorted it out and it was on the plane before they found somebody on the cape toown side who could tell them where to get the hardware and after that I said well then Cape Town is a place where nothing happens

[12:05] Before 9:00 and quarter 9 it’s finished it is laidback and yet it things happen I mean it’s the birthplace of AWS and or more more specifically I think the bulk of ec2 and that was builing K Town cor you shared your history in Java Stephen if we come back to you how did you get into Java development so I got into Java development 12 years ago and how it started was through college so I attended vity and there we were taught all these different programming languages vb.net Java yeah C sh all those kind of languages but I think for me I saw Java as there was structure it was stable you could follow in terms of the changes that they are doing you couldn’t just wake up and then some particular function is gone and nobody told you in advance what’s going to happen so from there that’s when I then picked Java as like my mainstream language so I then started working on Java projects from java SE Java e and then right now I’m also working with spring so during all that time I worked across different Industries from what you

[13:57] Call it from Finance MH to vehicle tracking also asset management and also some gambling or online betting type of companies and I would be responsible with the implementation of the backend of the platforms so that’s how I got to work with Java and yeah I still like Java and I will continue working with it then the other languages are just supplement on top because like now I am a full Stak developer so on the front end side I also work with other Frameworks like angular react and fjs so I do like a bit of both but my main stronghold is the bend which is Java so I would say in a n show that’s yeah how I started working with Java I think from when I came to South Africa I started staying in JC for two years working there in Bedford view so like what Coral was saying where people travel quite a lot to come to work I think there was a guy he was coming from I think I can’t remember now but some somewhere in Soo after Soto somewhere there there’s a town where so that guy was traveling like 60 G to come to work so two and for

[15:40] He travel like 120 so the yeah it’s it’s more like an Indian Community oh okay yes uhia or lenia yes so he was coming from lenia going to East Gate so it was quite a distance so yeah then at least it’s Highway all the way yeah at least then I then mve to cap town but yeah I think when I arrived to cap town I just felt at home and yeah I don’t think I would consider to but yeah so you moved to cap town and how did you get involved in the yaa User Group there okay so when I arrived in here in cap town the Java user group was there I think they had already started in like 2015 I think hmen and the other guys might have more info so I then joined the Meetup meetup group on meetup.com but by then I wasn’t active so I was still trying to figure out which is which and being kept down it has got also a lot of things so I was going around seeing the wi farms and all those kind of things but then I think around 2018 2019 somewhere there the person who was leading the cap Town Jaffa User Group then said they now had commitments and they could not proceed with the leading of

[17:26] Scheduling events and all that so then they put up a note on the Meetup to say if there’s anyone who is interested in stepping up to so that the community can continue they are willing to reach out so that’s when I reached out and then got to know himman and then from there on that’s when I then started becoming actively involved in the organization and planning of the user group so yeah so I think for me just what got me to be involved was just taking that leadership role where you go to plan you come up with a plan and also having to work with others to make the to achieve the goals so and just to keep the Java Community present so that people can know that you are there as developers because as we go along there are so many things that happen new languages come in and then sometimes developers they tend to become more like confused should I leave this one should I go with what but when there is more like a community of people that you can you are sharing the same knowledge with and ideas it more like gives you that

[19:04] Certainity that there is continuity tomorrow you’re not just going to wake up in Java is just absolute so yeah cor you mentioned that the Josie ju exists already a longer time were you part from it from the start or you joined it later yes I was attending meetings from the start and but I only got more involved in about 20112 when I started speaking and giving talks and in 2013 14 I can’t remember exactly which they asked me to if I wanted to become one of the co-organizers I said yes fine and I think most of the organizers have immigrated so we lost quite a few I mean Rory predy was one of the organizers as well but he’s he’s he joined Microsoft and he’s on their developer advocacy side and it makes it very difficult for him to stay involved as in the on the organizing side so he would still give talks or join especially when we were online he would join for the talks because when you do a online Meetup it’s it’s useful to have other people present that act as the audience because you don’t

[20:47] Have an a real audience and the speaker that doesn’t want to feel like he’s he’s he’s alone so but since about yeah I’d say 2017 18 I’ve been doing most of the organization yeah it’s been it’s been interesting and challenging especially since Co and we’re now actually end of the month doing our first inperson meeting again we feel things are stable in terms of Co yeah yes and I think it’s I think it’s time that we start meeting in person again we’ll see what the attendance is like but yes it’s been interesting but didn’t you do already virtual talks yes we did a lot of virtual I was a speaker never been there in the country but speaker yes no you joined us virtually we had quite a few virtual talks and but that I saw the numbers going down and down and I realized you know especially when everybody was working from home it’s if you spent a half your day on Zoom you don’t want to now do another it’s just another Zoom meeting it’s I think people are just zoomed out they

[22:37] Want to shut down and feel like they’re leaving work and this didn’t feel like leaving work yeah so I could see the numbers going down I got to a point where it wasn’t it wasn’t really worth it because we were like down to five or six people at a time it didn’t feel the same anymore so that’s why eventually I stopped that CU I was funding that myself out of my own pocket and I mean it was easier to get people to organize a venue and buy pizza for 50 people than to get them to sponsor a zoom license so I said no we’ll have to go back to getting people involved and get the community in the room and just get people to see each other because I think that’s that’s a big part of it if you if I look back at conferences the things I remember are the conversations I had with other attendees and the same thing with Java meetups the conversations you have before and after or the things that the connections you make and ideas you share and the questions that are asked that’s that that’s I think what makes a difference yeah indeed so you say you have your first

[24:04] Online in real life event again yes is that also the case on your side how did Co impact the Cape Town ja so covid really impacted us because I remember when covid started we had planned an event and it was an inperson event so I was really looking forward to that event I think I was also going to give a short talk as well on that on the schedule so yeah I had planned as well and then Co just happened and we had to cancel everything so during that time we resorted to online meetups and I think it was a blessing in dis guys on my end because normally when we meet up we would do it on our like amongst ourselves but now because it was online we’re able to invite other developers across the glob so it also opened that door that we had to invite other people during the covid it then opened up doors for us we were able to invite other speakers from across the globe we had speakers like Edson yanaga he used to work for Redhead I think now he’s with Google H we invited Mary I think it’s ginski is working with IBM so and E and some other

[25:58] Speakers that we managed to invite so it felt as if we our reach was more as opposed to when we were just the cap Town one because we would find speakers Among Us ourselves then we started with our face tace meetups last year that’s when we started and yeah it’s been going well the attendance is okay yeah like more people will RSVP but probably you get 50% of those people that will then yes so I think it’s it’s it’s been going well we try to at least have like one event per per per month but sometimes also it can be a challenging to find a speaker what’s on your agenda cor for the next J so you said the first in person again yes so we actually have one of your colleagues stepen Simon R is visiting and they reached out and said if we want to plan anything and I said well now there’s an opportunity to Kickstart because on the one hand it will attract more people than than normally and I haven’t seen him in a while I was lucky to meet him I think in 2016 when he was here and a few times since so he’s going to speak

[27:54] At this Meetup and then we have a few sponsors that we’re basically planning ahead I’m reaching out to find talks I think that the one thing about having a local user group is that you get local people to contribute which is both a challenge but also rewarding because you see people Elevate their game because I mean there’s this saying that goes around I heard it when I was young when somebody said they you can do and they who can’t teach but that’s untrue MH especially in it you don’t you don’t get to stay a teacher in it if you can’t unless you’ve got 10 year already University but at a Meetup you can’t come and talk about something you don’t know about it just doesn’t work you’re going to fall in your face so I’ve always found that there’s nothing that challenges you more in increasing your knowledge and rounding out your knowledge than preparing for a talk and so I’ve seen people especially we would do a what we call a lightning talk evening so then we’ll have three or four 15 minute talks and it’s

[29:41] Actually challenging to prepare a 15minute talk but for people who are just starting it seems like less of a less scary thing to do than being the only one speaking and having to speak for half an hour or what or 3/4 of an hour so we’ve had people prepare lightning talks and do something interesting and then they feel comfortable to do more we’ve had people move up from starting at The Jug and now that International speakers some of them are living abroad and working for large companies so it’s it’s interesting to see that journey and even though somebody might bring a topic that you think you know they might always introduce you to some aspect that you don’t know and for people who don’t who might not understand something 100% having a new person introduced the topic is always useful because they bring a slightly different approach and so there’s there’s there’s always something to gain and even if you think you’re an expert on the topic you might learn something or you get to contribute you get to help answer a question when somebody puts up

[31:30] Their hand they ask a question the speaker say you know I’m not sure and somebody else says well how about this and that’s when it gets interesting it feels weird when they end the talk and they open up for questions and there’s no questions and they feel like a comedian who hasn’t had a single love because you want to invite questions I see that questions are being asked more at a ju than at a conference the conference you are with a few hundred people in a room a jug is smaller you’re closer to the presenter you already had eye contact so I feel it’s a lot easier to ask questions at a j definitely I think it’s a matter of people are scared I mean if usually if it’s a conference there’s few people they might know it might even be International so they scared to stand up and expose their limitations when as I mean in it you have to accept that nobody can know everything we are always learning and if you think your job is going to be to know everything then you’ve got a problem because that’s not it yeah you must know where to go to find

[33:00] Answers and one of them is to attend meetups and ask questions and yes I see people are more willing to ask questions especially if it’s a small group or if they’ve attended more than once yes yeah agree and also an important fact that you pointed out is starting as a speaker that a ju is an ideal playground to testing talk and you’re right we will have a lightning talks at BJ next week I’ll give one as a preparation of a talk I will give at fosm another conference Yes again The Jug is my testing audience testing ground yes yes by the way you’re completely right a 50-minute talk is way more difficult than a long talk because it’s too much I want to talk about and I have to condense it and go yes but that’s the that’s the thing is actually you have to condense it down to 15 minutes and then you expand it by just saying the same thing in different ways because if you bring too much you overwhelm your audience my aim is usually just to leave them okay I want to know more about this topic and now I’ll go and research because it’s not a lecture it’s not a

[34:39] Training session I can’t teach you everything I can interest you in the topic and I can tell you where to find more information I can show you something interesting one of the ones I enjoyed most was my very first lightning talk and I it was just after spring data was launched I did a lightning talk on Spring data and seeing people light up to the fact that I just declared an interface and the method signature is translated into a query blew their minds and that’s all I want wanted them to understand is that and they all went wow yes I want to know more and but if you have to do now half an hour or 3/4 of an hour you know have to elaborate on this and it’s not it’s not needed because them now investing they time to discover is when the real things happen M and the real learning happen because there’s no learning than other than really doing you can’t really learn programming from or aspects of it just by listening to a talk or watching a video you have to get in there and do it so if I can convince you to do that or influence you to go and Learn by yourself then I

[36:26] Think I’ve achieved my goal and for me that’s always if I see one person face light up and you can see they’ve grasped it then I’m happy then I’ve achieved something I I’m sure that everything I’m using as a developer are things I picked up from conference talks videos a book we are in such a fast evolving environment that we have to keep up and JS are really great to get that knowledge Stephen same question for you is what are the future plans for your ju do you already have next meeting scheduled so starting this year we already have our event scheduled for the first of Feb we’re just fortunate enough to find a speaker Simon R from Azu oh yes yes so he is visiting cap Town and then he then reached out and say please can I then do a talk on ja so he’s going to be here and we already published the event so we’re just going to try and maintain the momentum finding Global speakers finding local speakers and at least try an event once a month or maybe once in two months so that’s the future plans they are also other suggestions like maybe doing something

[38:08] Like what do you call it more like coding challenges there’s that term that we use it’s to run away now more heon type of thing so we haven’t done that but I think it’s something nice to explore and just try something new and see the response and how it goes so I think that’s how the plans and of how we are approaching this year can you remember your Mo most remarkable session or something which went completely wrong I would say the most remarkable session I would just remember probably the recent events there was an event that we did last year I was presenting on that event it was mainly about microservices so and it was also a what you call it a physical Meetup so I would say after the presentation there was a lot of positive feedback from the people that attended so it really went well it also helped with the next event U more those same people they also invited other people to come so I would say yeah that event really went well the ones that did not go well I wouldn’t say there are some that did not go well I would just say

[39:56] Probably there are challenges sometimes in terms of the organization of the meetups so we need tools to use so I think Corel touched it on a bit that he was also financing from his pocket some of these things so like now we don’t have a sponsor for Zoom which is more of the tool that is U flexible in terms of what we want to achieve so now we have to use the free version type of softwares like air me and all those kind of and then it poses a challenge because normally they will just give you an hour and your hour also starts if you are the organizer then you start the meeting and then people are 10 minutes late or then it’s already eating up into your presentation time so in the end the final output like if you didn’t want to share something afterwards you are not going to have that final output that you envisioned before starting the meeting so I would say those are the challenges that in the end you then feel like oh okay it didn’t go well but in terms of the actual content or the actual presentation you get positive feedback from the people that would have

[41:27] Attended yeah that that’s the answer I most of the times get each event is good even if the demo fails you learn from the error that happens so if there’s a bad session then it’s probably because something happened with organization stuff and or someone got sick or was delayed stuff like that but a session once it started it’s always productive is that the same impression you have cor I can tell you about the worst one we had and that was probably there’s a South African who lives in Andora skull cronier I don’t know if you’ve ever met him but he he’s actually involved in I think the Barcelona jug as well but he was visiting family in the country and reached out and we organized the Meetup for him to speak everything organized and we had a RSVP of about 80 which meant we would probably have between 30 and 50 people and then during that day there was a riot in Johannesburg and people were sent home early so he arrived and it was me and one other of the organizers and one person attended and they were walking distance from the event and they were unaware that there was a riot in Johannesburg so we had one

[43:08] Attendee and one speaker and two organizers and a whole lot of pizza and he gave his talk and we all learned something but purely the fact that there was hardly anybody there was painful the attendee went home with t-shirts and boxes of pizza and oh we had quite a laugh about it skul was very gracious and he understood the situation but that is now that’s the worst kind of thing that can happen is something completely external yeah indeed disrupt you completely but as someone said before in one of these podcast is it’s not about the number of people that join it’s just all the people that are there are the white people for your topic for your talk they want to hear what you’re going to tell so okay maybe Tre is a bit really low number but it’s all really the people that need to be there are there so I can’t think of our best one it’s I mean we’ve had very we’ve had lot of good ones I think the greatest fun we had was when we had hackathons we had one where I think it’s an IBM sort of platform you code your own little racing bot and you

[44:50] Participate in racing so the bot gets feedback back as to where what the track looks like and where the other Racers are and you have to code a bot and then they race against each other and that was great fun probably because I won I enjoyed it more than most but it was yeah it’s it’s that kind of thing is a lot of fun but it’s actually the most challenging to organize because you need different kind of setup you need everybody needs to be able to sit down with a computer and you need a challenge that can fit in the time frame now in this case we gave them everything weeks in advance so they could code their bot and at the day we had multiple challenges so that was that was interesting Stephen you already have an ID for your hackaton yes not really I only have the broad idea but not the objectives as to okay what’s needed so I think Connie might also assist there in terms of okay what do what are the options where can we get like let’s say those BS where are you going to get

[46:35] The Hardway and all those kind of things so it’s it’s just something that is on the agenda but it needs to be planned as to where are we going to get the things and how are we also going to conduct it m but those are nice plans for 2024 so you have a whole year in front of you let’s wrap up we’re nearly at an hour where can people find your ju I have the Meetup Pages already of Josie ju and Cape Town Java Meetup yes please share the links with me I will add them to the show notes that people can find both your Juck and you online both LinkedIn Twitter madon whatever we’ll add it to this show to the show notes of the podcast is there anything left that you want to ask or tell the listeners of this podcast one thing that I would love to see is actually a place where jug organizers can interact and share ideas because I think that’s something that’ll be very useful maybe if you because I think there’s a DRS channel on Foojay on the Foojay maybe that’s a good place to do it because if there’s nothing that says if one drug has done something nobody

[48:07] Else should be able to do it in fact if it works share it and because that’s when the real magic happens and we used to have a this was part of one of our end of year thing so we usually had a end of year Meetup that was a bit different and so that’s something that I would love to see because that’s where you share ideas and you get inspiration yeah and for you Steve yes I think from my side is if we can get more sponsors in terms of the tools that we use to organize I think we have a sponsor for the meetup.com which is Microsoft and we are really grateful for that but if we can also have more sponsors on board so that it becomes easier to also share the information sometimes we have a very good presentation but we could not record it because there was the tool needs to be paid so if we can at least get sponsors there that can help us then we’ll be able to have more reach and also it makes the organiz the organizing of the events a little bit easier so yeah I think that’s my request that’s really good question and inde maybe something we

[49:48] Should discuss on the Foojay slack so all the people interested in OpenJDK can join the Foojay slack it’s we on the free platform again sponsoring we are on the free platform but that means that we can have as many people as we want just not the full history I think yes the history drops off of 90 days I think and there is a j channel indeed so people who are interested in joining a Jer or organizing a Jer or have questions can also join this Channel I will also add a link to the show notes to the slack Channel okay thanks a lot enjoying the very warm weather on your side thank you oh thank you Frank for inviting us and doing this I think it’s it’s just another way to make people aware of java it’s not as if Java doesn’t have the momentum to survive and continue but I think there are people stuck in the wrong place and they might enjoy their work a lot more if they were using something with the both longevity and vigorous renewal that Java is in at the moment or are already using Java but are stuck to some older version and are not of all the

[51:25] Evolution and that’s I want to thank you we will have a moment of silence for the people stuck on Java 5 that’s one of the nice messages that the JS are spreading that Java is evolving fast and that a lot of new tools improvements in performance in developer experience are all part of the new Java let’s call it like that okay thank you both for your time and yeah I also want to say thank you as well yeah for inviting us and taking your time doing this it’s not easy yeah you’d have to sacrifice and make sure everything is in order and all this also post production that’s going to happen after this and all that so we really appreciate and yeah I think I will also follow on the Foojay and everything that’s get involved hoping to be also more involved and follow up on the updates and thank you for your time because I learned from each recording that I make so that’s exactly why I’m doing this thanks a lot have a nice day and thank you also the listeners of the podcast keep an eye on Foojay for future articles and podcasts about development and everything related to the Java World

[52:49] Thanks for listening give me a give me a j give me the friends OpenJDK