Foojay Podcast #46: JUG Switzerland

Transcript

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[0:00] Hello and welcome to this new edition of the Foojay podcast Switzerland is our next stop on the virtual yava User Group World Tour welcome to the Foojay 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 in this episode I’m leaving the European Union and stepping over the border of Switzerland the country where the Red Cross was started and many International institutions have their headquarters let’s find out if there’s also a big yava Community hello I’m I’m Patrick bomgardner I’m part of the Java User Group in Switzerland and I’m currently hosting most of the events in surc and in zalan as well besides that I’m lectur at the University of applian Sciences I teach some spring courses quite a few of them talk on conferences and have many other Hobbies of course I’m Simon Martinelli and I’m in active in the CH USIC group since 2011 I would say I started the Java community in Burn as part of java music group switzland and I’m a con freelance consultant I’m a lectur at the universities as well and I’m a Char

[1:26] Champion and I’m also doing conference talks and stuff like that thank you and I’m Frank Lort technical writer at aul and producer of this Foojay podcast before we dive into the ju and Java what should we know about Switzerland yeah Switzerland is the central country in Europe but it’s not part of the European Union for some reasons and speaking of the Java user group we have one Java User Group in Switzerland that is for the whole Swiss speak H German speaking part because we have four languages in Switzerland and every user group or every city that is part of the jav user group of the German speaking part like Turk burn lern San and puzle and I even would add like besides chocolate we are famous for actually only the milk chocolate not like the dark chocolate you know we also have like some awesome conferences here as well and that means like we are running within the vo days Community around three conferences like vo day Sur vo days toino and even like vo CERN so and we had all three conferences this year already so we had a good start already into the year and we just

[2:54] Started with three months in the new year so indeed so that answers the question is there a yava community in Switzerland yes a big one there is wonderful Java stuff going on in Switzerland maybe you you’re aware of the gr VM stuff so basically like Oracle Labs has the one of the biggest research centers from Oracle like in Europe is in Switzerland so the gr VM team is actually like in surc so that means also like we have some more access to those people and we recently just I think it was in November a talk from Thomas vinger where he explained like how the chat works in the gr VM which was an incredible talk I love that a lot and also on the other side and that’s like to wordss more your direction Simon and also the quarcus team has quite a lot of people in Nel so in Switzerland you can actually say even like basic infrastructure in the Java ecosystem with Frameworks and technology and so on is done in Switzerland and even like if you think of the spring framework as well like the test context framework and the J unit 5 there are people in Switzerland actually working on those

[4:10] Things so it’s not just like that we are users and Community here is really like basic infrastructure done for what we are using every day as work so speakers looking for a good location where they can interact with a lot of people of indeed users and developers and the people building all these things they can really find them in Switzerland yeah and what I found interesting and I mean from a chav user perspective I heard like last year at javaland that like the Juni team is coming to Switzerland just having a workshop on their own right and I said I want to do an event with you I would be great to have a talk and a panel right and also similar things actually are happening with the gr VM team when they have their ecosystem community meet up where all the framework vendors are getting together where you talk about like what they do need to do like with the gr VM and I’m also in touch with them because they do that yearly and I also want to hold with them an event if you think of like you have helon you have like Micronaut you have spring boot you have quarcus you have the gr VM team

[5:20] I mean they’re meeting here like once a year and if I just get in touch with them or if I hear something I always want to try to do an event because I mean that makes it even Al interesting for our community because it’s a possibility to meet those people and you can meet them they are just like regular human beings like you and me and you can talk about all these things and they can even like tell you some very interesting stories what’s happening behind the scenes what is your background in Java you both mentioned you’re even a teacher so I think you pretty experience with Java right yes I started like 20 4 years ago with Java before I was doing Cobble on IBM mainframe computers and then I was lucky that they could move to the Javas space and I think I’m teaching since 2 seven and mainly architecture Java with spring Boot and also persistence with jpa hibernate and for me it’s actually like I produced Java already for also 20 years and I had the luck actually in 2011 to become one of the official spring trainers so that’s where I’m running around with spring trainings on obviously spring framework

[6:42] Spring boot Spring Security and stuff like that and then also like at the University I do some software engineering courses where I also teach like architecture where we work on projects with the students with the same Technologies but also like with frontend stuff as well and obviously also for my clients I basically do that as well doing some Consulting on the topics but it’s it’s even more than just Java in the end right Java is just a tool it’s a tool but I see there’s a big difference between countries about what languages are used in universities so apparently there’s a big focus on Java in Switzerland in universities or is it the mix between C Java C languages I can only speak for my un universities so I’m in burn and in Alton so that’s Northwestern part of Switzerland and there java is the main language when it comes to regular software development so but there are also Pyon for machine learning for example but I don’t see a lot of net orc development at universities at least at the universities I know so and I can actually like second that so for us

[8:01] It’s exactly the same and also we have some JavaScript courses too but basically Java is like the first language they learn yeah what we as Java lovers of course find a very good idea now about the JS you mentioned there’s a Swiss jug for the German speaking part so there are a lot of locations where you organize events correct it’s basically like Burn c turn Basel and St G as well so that means like five locations we run also events online we have a very nice YouTube Channel where we have at the moment about 63 videos we have started with that actually during Corona and besides that we have have also a Java User Group in loan and Geneva and in Chino as well but there at the moment not so that active and the we call it the Swiss Java user group so the five basically German speaking locations and we have because of that kind of the freedom and having somebody in the back office helping us to organize events quite a lot and that’s actually a huge advantage and that means also like the whole member Administration the sponsoring stuff and so on so we can manage that under one

[9:20] Umbrella and the other thing is actually what is also really nice about that is if some speakers come to Switzerland and they want to do like more than one Chuck we can almost organize a Swiss tour and we have done done that in the past already that people really like visited five locations within a week I’m not saying that happens like all the time and it depends on the people coming to us but also like on the people hosting because like every every place is individually organized so it’s not like you’re not forced to do it if if you don’t find anyone to host an event for a speaker then it won’t happen you know so it’s more like if if everything matches that would be like the optimal thing and then some things like this can work out you mentioned someone in the back office so is there a budget is someone hired or is this someone working for a company no we have someone as Swiss Java user group we have somebody hired or someone hired urula she’s actually with us already for 20 years and she works for us and helps us to like organize the locations and the catering and sends out all

[10:30] The emails to the participants and members yeah I think this is the first J I talk to which has someone hired which is actually organized a bit as a company then I guess I wouldn’t say so I mean she’s the only person paid right and that’s absolutely okay and that’s actually also great and with the amount of events we do I think we had last year 55 events in our five locations that quite a bit and that means also there’s quite a lot of effort behind that and yeah so actually like that’s awesome and we are probably like also like one of the longest running Java User Group in the world yeah and how is she paid is that thanks to sponsors yes we have many sponsors in Switzerland and I would say we had sponsors already from the beginning I don’t know exactly when sponsoring start started so the ja us group started in 1996 already so one year after Jaa came out finally and I would say we had sponsors more or less always first the jav user group by the way was only in Suk so I think the second location was born in 2011 and then the other locations also came and we never had issues to

[11:58] Pay for the event because we are hosting events on different locations like in at University for example or also in a restaurant or in event location where we have to pay rent for the event location so and thanks to our sponsors we can do that yeah and also that allows us to be independent you know if you host an event at a company maybe there will be people running around trying to hire the participants and because of that we are like in a neutral space and that allows us actually also like to get together seeing the talk and then also have proper networking afterwards so we really privileged that we have that many members that we have five locations and also a lot of sponsors helping us and a lot of events we’re recording this session on the 22nd of March I just checked your masteron account you had three events this week alone Simon you were speaker at one of them yes exactly Simon as as one of the organizers and one of the speakers is that an advantage that you get the opportunity to speak a lot it was a bit strange you know the point is I did this like it was the it was a brand new talk that I had for

[13:14] The first time and it was different because I knew a lot of people in the audience usually if I speak at the conference I don’t know a lot of people sitting in the audience and this makes me a bit extra nervous for the talk but it was great and I like to talk at CH USIC groups because after the talk you have a lot of time to talk with the audience to share some thoughts about the talk for example or about the topic and that’s something that doesn’t happen at conferences usually so that’s very nice to speak there but I don’t speak very often at jav USIC group Maybe I don’t know in the past maybe three or four times are these big events how many people attend a J in average it depends on the location so currently like on Tuesday we had it was in burn and we had 50 people so that was quite a good number because after Corona we didn’t have a lot of people anymore probably because most of the people didn’t go even to the office so this changed a bit because people need or must go to the office again so it’s better for us by the way for the conferences for the talks we

[14:42] Have smaller locations like bosel on G or lern and in tur how many are you currently well we have we had before Corona we had often events like with 100 and 120 participants that was very common and now actually like when it’s a typical number would be like 50 to 70 somewhere in between we recently also had like one where we had not enough space in the room because we had like seats for 80 people I think and people had to sit like on the side which is actually like awesome you know and yeah I mean things after Corona has changed we are getting back actually I think I hope it will take some time yeah but yeah we also try and to run also like on other days you know I mean what it’s more like now Tuesdays and Thursdays where people are in the office Wednesdays Fridays Mondays are usually really bad these are the typical home office days in companies in Switzerland so we try to do the events there so and people are anyway in the city it’s easier actually for to join for them so also on your side you’ve seen a big impact on the Corona on the on how you organize events and the number of visitors

[15:57] Yeah and it even gets like more unpr predictable because of that also because of the noos and I mean we tried during the corona times we tried to be there for our members so that’s like why we started our YouTube channel and started to host also quite a lot of events and you can imagine how it is like you don’t do networking after that if you even run it live you’re sitting like already eight hours in your chair at home and then actually you spend there another hour or even more so even like the interaction with the online events we had it’s not that super great I mean it’s better than nothing and what we found out was actually like people watch the talks afterwards on Sunday on YouTube because we were pushing the recorded talks out on Sunday and then at 10:00 actually when you were subscribed you got the notification and I think we have currently like 1,600 subscriber on our YouTube channel and even without saying please push on the thumbs up and press the subscription thing people still subscribe and that’s actually also awesome I add the link to the YouTube channel and also to your website and

[17:08] All the other accounts to the show notes of this postcast of course so you mentioned also Vox already in the beginning so it’s not only JS you also do conferences and other events well actually that’s that’s part of my hobby I would say so I’m involved in the Vox day surc organization committee and I’m I’m the co-organizer of that event and like my friends in toino in CERN they also doing something there so we have like one vo family in Switzerland which belongs then to the bigger deox and Vox days Community as well and we are lucky actually also with the Java User Group they’re supporting us also quite a bit so that means actually like we had three weeks back we had our event and the awesome thing is actually the Java us us group has usually a booth there to get in touch with the members so that means like Ura is there and we have ice cream for the participants so we have like a stand with ice cream proper ice cream and then actually like yeah I mean it’s a unique thing where do you get ice cream at the conference in a cinema right so people just love it and we have done that or the chav user group has

[18:20] Done that already for three years and we don’t want to miss that again you know yeah it’s very good way to get people together obviously we want to get in touch with the members there with the boo the Java user group and it’s not 100% just like that we go there for new members but it’s also to stay in touch with the old ones you know and like also explain to others like what we do as a fry Yeah Yeah you mentioned it’s a hobby but it’s a hobby which takes quite some time organizing all the events attending events why do you do this what’s what’s the benefit for you I think I mean I always say like if you run events you can invite other speakers which is nice you find friends right and if you’re a speaker yourself as well and that’s what I do too you just can go to other events and meet those people again so it’s a wonderful opportunity to provide your friends the space to join and then you go to their events and also you have the time to meet with them and discuss on the topics and things like that so in the end it’s just like I would say a nice way of interaction

[19:36] With people where you won’t meet otherwise and having conferences would allow to actually meet and even sometimes in working time you know you travel there you meet them during the week and it’s not like that you would have to meet your friends then on weekends where it gets complicated with families and things like that so you really can like Leverage your network you can discuss things you can work on some topics together whatever and even like if you do trainings not trainings talks and workshops like in pairs I mean there is not there is nothing more fun than that actually like pairing on all the things for you Simon what’s what’s the reason for you to do this yeah I was asking people in Turk back in the days where we only had Turk as a location why they don’t organize events in Burn For example and they said oh no problem we can do that if you will host them and so I started hosting events in Burn first alone now in the meanwhile I have Thomas who is helping me or Thomas is in charge now I’m just helping so we changed changed roles yeah yeah and for me it was like first of all

[20:54] About the networking not only with the speakers but also with the people that are coming because we have quite a community in burn that regularly comes to the talks so most often I would say half of the people are always the same so we meet with friends let’s say and on the other hand it was great to meet great speakers from all around the world and as Patrick said so in the meanwhile I’m also a speaker myself so it’s great opportunity also to go to other locations mhm for that yeah Simon we met already few times in devox in Anor I think also in the Netherlands for J fall J spring you do quite a lot of conferences you’re a consultant is this out of personal interest because yeah you take time to travel the cost of the travel also why do you go to conferences all over the world and talk about the topics that interest you I started to do that because I wanted to show my IDs or my view of about certain things that I think are not as they should be for example in projects and I want to show better or alternative solutions for example for that and I was very surprised few years ago when I was

[22:24] Accepted at a conference for the first time at an international that was spring iio in Barcelona and from that point I submit my talks and a lot of them get accepted so last year was a very busy year that’s also why we met twice and this year I hope it will not be that busy because I have to work on a project so we have deadlines and we will go to production in June so I’m quite busy at work I often try to take my wife at me so we can see the world or at least Europe so we go also to Atlanta to the conference in April and yeah it’s a great opportunity and if you know the people at the conferences or you the speakers it’s also kind of a reunion at every conference where you can talk with them and it’s very very interesting for me to share yeah and I very lucky that I can do that so I’m a freelance consultant and I do that more or less in my spare time but very often I also work so during traveling when I go by train I work in the train do you see the ju as as a starting point you mentioned you gave a new talk this week is The Jug where you try it out and then go to a

[23:49] Conference or is it where you get IDs in fact this time it was the first time that I first gave the talk at the chuk usually it’s the other way around and I would say for younger developers or other developers that like to have talks they should come to the Java User Group because we try to motivate them to come and we also want to hear like talks from companies that are not defs or professional speakers because we want to know what people are doing and it’s also a chance for them for example if they want to hire people so they can spread a word what they do and show the interesting projects they have and so we really try to do that but that’s not that easy to get people from the community speaking at such events I totally agree with actually Simon so I think for new joiners the Java user group is a very nice place to experiment some things getting familiar being in a safe environment because people are also willing to like see I sometimes say the death RS make the life harder for the new chers because they at the level really high and everyone thinks I have to be the same

[25:11] But no you can have shitty slides I think you can be a total nerd if you tell about the story if your story is about like what you love about your passion I don’t care about how is it presented you know and people can ask you afterwards like honest questions and you know your things you know and that is authentic and I think the Chavis user group has space for this it doesn’t have to be the brightest and chines speakers all the time and I think that makes it really difficult but I also know that people from companies they they’re in projects they don’t have time to additionally like prepare those things you know it’s quite hard and for me it was more like the other way around also like for Simon I started giving talks at conferences before actually like I was also doing some talks at the Java user groups so yeah I mean there is either way and I think you just need to find your own safe space where you can play around where you can like get some feedback first before maybe you go to a bigger event and indeed the joke is very safe if you go to as a speaker to conference

[26:21] You’re in front of a big room even if there’s not a lot of people in there but it’s a big room a cinema whatever so it can be quite impressive while a jug is very comfortable everyone is closer around you can directly interact with the people so for me a jug is indeed much more friendly as a new speaker you well in a cinema room actually like the lights help a lot because you don’t see the audience yeah so you actually don’t know how many people there are in the room yes are there any sessions which were remarkable in a way that they were very exceptionally good or exceptionally bad maybe some things that went wrong in the past you have a long history so I can imagine that quite a few things happened for me what’s always exciting is if some very popular speaker is there for example vat or Josh because then there are so many people in BN like I think I don’t know I would say it was w had once a talk with him quite a while ago and we had over a 100 people in burn and that was more like three times that we usually had in back in the days and that was insane so we met people I’ve never seen

[27:45] Before and that’s that’s a good thing about having popular speakers but as Patrick said that’s also a bit scary for people in the audience who think oh no I don’t want to speak here so many people that I don’t want to do that yeah I think we never had we had once a very interesting situation because in Switzerland we always start on time so usually we start at 6 and we start at 6 so that’s a German thing or also a swits thing that we are very on time and we once had people from Bruno was there Bruno bores and he was late mhm and he was really late like five minutes late not like really late but it was already like in the Crowd Oh the speaker is not here what we going to do and then Bruno explained that in Brazil where he originally is from it’s it’s completely different so that people are always late so that’s if if you are on time you are too early so it’s quite a difference to what we do in Switzerland yeah but other than that I never had like situation that was did you have anything scary or strange no actually scary not but like once we had an issue with the room I mean an issue with the

[29:11] Room that the room was too small we had Michael feds before Corona and I think we filled the room with 180 people so and then still actually people starting still signing up for the event and that was kind of scary but on the other hand when you say like negative things maybe there are events where nobody wants to join and we also had like events where which we had to cancel just because not enough people would be there and obviously sometimes then it’s our fault because we just like published events like on a short notities so it’s almost impossible and I mean the other things not really I mean you have the technical issues with the projectors at the blank screens and the infrastructure but that’s something you can somehow handle right that’s a constant in this these talks that I have with J there are no bad sessions a demo can go wrong but even then you learn something by fixing the demo so then again it becomes a group activity to fix the problem I had the same thing I was presenting The Jug in the Netherlands and indeed we had a problem with the screen it decided to

[30:22] Update the screen decided to update during the post so we had to wait for the screen it was back but yeah that’s that’s practical stuff that’s not what makes a j bad so then you decide to work on it together and that’s again the strength of a community I think yeah the other perspective you have you should actually also take is when I go there as a participant the topic is just a teaser and in the end actually like the networking talking to each other is the thing right if you have afterwards great discussions you meet some body new and you just like found out that other companies have similar problems like you and so on that’s actually like what is the best part of it and we as a Java user group I mean or even for me personally we want to bring the people together and the thing is like you know that vendors have some blueprints in architecture but you want to know what’s going wrong with that or like who has the same problem who can you call afterwards just like to find find out what have they done to actually like solve those problems because well you cannot always

[31:35] Trust the vendor or maybe you don’t want to always trust a vendor you want to have like a third- party view on something and I think actually like that was the best part of a user group where people get together where they exchange where they can discuss and they’re actually like I usually say at D the magic happens mhm do you have a structure to do that so one hour for the talk and then a drink or how do you do this yeah so we only do like a one hour talk and then afterwards there is upo time yes so upo is actually having having drinks and food together and we rarely do two talks in a row because that would be already too late so that means like I If you start at 6 you would finish by 8 and people would already go home right so we need the space actually for the networking part do you have future plans you already have a very tight schedule with a lot of events do you plan to add more or more locations or other types of events we also do workshops sometimes not very often but we do I had one with Patrick Patrick was my host like I was doing a VIN Workshop no no surprise I

[32:52] Would say and there we had the work the networking in between so we did a break or two breaks and then people can Network during the workshop so they will go home after the workshop directly more mhm I would say other than that we have a summer party so without talks just food and drinks so to get people together we are doing that like second time or the third time this year third time I think actually we started after the 25th anniversary party we said we are going to continuously doing that because that party was so awesome H just because like friends and family even like people I haven’t seen for TW 10 years or more they just came as well because we celebrated that birthday and then we said we are going to do that every summer from now on yeah and is that also sponsored or do the people have to pay to join we just use the money from the sponsors and from the membership fees for that sure yeah in the end it’s not about the money if you would know like who would show up even if a small fee people will still join I would believe do you have any questions to the listeners of that podcast or you want to

[34:08] Invite them as a speaker or as a guest at your events definitely I mean if somebody’s interested to join the Swiss Java user group and to a talk there is a very easy way to actually get in touch with us we have on the website the speaker section where you can fill out the form and then actually the back office gets the message and we’ll actually share it with the organizers from all the locations in our slack Channel and then we are going to discuss like who gets in touch with you try to find out what are the possibilities what we can do and so on so everyone is invited basically to submit their interesting topics and then we find out together like what we do and we often have this actually happening so it’s not always us approaching others so yeah that’s actually really an another nice way and we also have the chance actually to support you with some limited amount of budget for traveling expensive if you’re traveling like from outside Switzerland or especially like burn and surc is quite expensive with hotel and other things so we can even support you there

[35:20] Simon something you want to ask to the listeners no absolutely so come to Java User Group even if you’re in vac for example in Switzerland check out our website and maybe there is a talk during your day maybe your family will not be happy if you go to Jo group talk but yeah it’s always interesting and most of our talks are in English so it’s a it depends a bit on the location Turk is more or less always in English I would say yesterday we had the German talks yeah but usually you see it very easily on the entries of the events on the website so we have basically the rule if it’s announced in English then actually the talk will be held in English and if it’s in German it’s clear it will be German so we try to like signal in which language there will be they will be hold right but more I mean English is not a problem in Switzerland and in tur it’s most often in English yes yeah but because Turk has the more International developers so burn is more like the capital of Switzerland so you have to speak German as a developer usually because you want to talk to the business people and

[36:34] That’s also why we have a lot of German speaking talks maybe and more English speaking in tur mhm where can the people find you if they want to follow you so I found the Mong link I will share that in the show notes we already mentioned the YouTube channel there’s the website j. CH correct yes are there any more links we should share we have Twitter as well and we also have a community slack Channel but that’s also mentioned on the website okay thanks a lot for your time thank you for joining this recording and thank you also to the listeners of this episode keep an eye on Foojay for future articles about development and everything related to the Java World thanks a lot give me a f give me a j give me the friends of OpenJDK