Ok, it isn’t truly day 1 but it is my first day. Today is Sunday which is the second day of the tutorials. I’ve been to JavaOne but it wasn’t nearly this large. The conference is spread across Moscone West, South, and the Hilton hotel. It looks like I will be doing a substantial amount of walking between the conference center and the Hilton. I’ve already done a bit of walking today to find out what is where and what hands on labs that I can sneak into.
I’ve already gotten kicked out of one session. It was funny because I went in and did 99% of the lab and jumped out to answer a phone call. I got tagged going back into the room but they let me go back in to get my stuff and leave. The hands on tracks are very interesting. Very open format with lectures between labs. I like this idea.
I don’t think that I have seen this many laptops in one place in my life. The open access systems are all laptops. The hands on labs are all laptops. They all have 19 inch screens attached to them. I wonder what these machines will do once this event is finished. My guess is that they are leased and will go to the next big trade show. When I was with Sun we deployed a large server and a series of JavaStations. I wonder what the cost tradeoff now is for laptops and java consoles.
I have been trying to plan my schedule. It is challenging because they won’t let Oracle employees register. We have to wait until 10 minutes into the talk and take a seat if there is one. I understand but it does make planning and scheduling difficult. The biggest problem that I am having is deciding on what I want to be when I grow up. I’ve always adopted the philosophy of doing one or two things very well, making a name for myself, and moving on to the next topic. Oracle seems to have an information page setup for all of the products that is driven by product marketing. I’ve used this tactic before. I might need to write a series of tutorials or possibly a book to bring up my levels of expertise.
more later….