JavaONE 2008: ...and final inter-continental hacking, or Alcatraz the ultimate hacker space 📎
JavaONE 2008 is definetely over :-(. It was inspiring again. I had the chance to talk to many Sun engineers and exchange ideas, experiences and thoughts during breakfeasts and lunch (compatible with John Gage's idea :-)). I especially enjoyed the BOFs - they went sometimes deeply into the technology and ended in openspace-like fashion. However - after JavaONE you will need vacations - it starts at 8.30 AM - and ends about 11 PM - sleeping is really optional. I even sacrificied the After Dark party this year...
However my flight took about 13h - which is long and borring. As every year I spent the whole time working or writing articles etc. It is always amazing how much you can achieve during this time and how fast 13h actually are. This year, during the flight to J1, I prepared the slides for my lightning talks, short talks and wrote demos for my actuall RIA-talk. Beyond that I read about 200 pages / articles of various Java-Books.
On the way back I wrote whole article about Domain Driven Design with EJB 3 and JPA 1.0 for JavaSPEKTRUM (in German). During the process of writing I recognized that my sample was far less fluent, than actually expected and refactored the whole domain layer (http://p4j5.dev.java.net - RunAndBike). I had the opportunity to charge my notebook in frankfurt, and spent the last hour to munich with the refactoring of the underworld.dev.java.net communication layer.
It seem like without internet, in a boring place you can get really productive. However, you don't have necessary to fly - something like Alcatraz should work as well. No internet, no distraction and no way out. Is this the end of the "Google's Nice Work Place" era? :-)