JavaZone 2015 conference in Oslo

After the holiday break thanks to the WebOn company I had an opportunity to attend in JavaZone 2015 conference in centre of Oslo.
I will not write about details of the conference. All the information you can check on their cool website. I will focus on my personal impression after the conference.

Overview

First of all I was surprised about the huge scale of the event – around 2500 people. Perfect place (Oslo Spektrum) for such a big event. Presenters and talks shared with the audience were interesting. Excellent food served full day!
Well prepared in details and organised without any issues.

Talks

My favourite talks that I attended:

Continuous Delivery and Zero Downtime: what your architecture needs to succeed by Alex Fontaine
The dangers of building microservices by Christopher Batey
Up in the sky: Architecture and Deployment of Microservices for the Cloud by Alex Fontaine
Microservices for Mortals by Bert Ertman
Building microservices with functional domain model and event sourcing by Chris Richardson
Beyond Basic Auth – Logins for Apps and APIs by Stian Thorgersen

It’s worth to say that all talks were almost instantly available online. Yeah!

Pros and cons

What I liked the most:

Overflow room – big cinema room with huge screen where you can watch all 7 rooms in real time. You got headphones and in any time you were able to switch the sound between the rooms.
Informal style of the conference. All the elements such as website, signs, opening movie, mailing and so on have geeky style.
Excellent food served full day!
Great place (Oslo Spektrum) in the centre of the city.
Simple pricing plan. One price for all activities.

There is always a place to improvement so here are few tips from my perspective:

Almost international character. Most of the tasks (especially on the main rooms) were in English. But part of the tasks were in Norwegian.
Lack of one longer break in the middle of the day (at least 30 minutes).
To less contests with the prizes. Official t-shirt is a nice gift but some IT books or electronic gadgets could involve geeks in required activities such as visit the partners stand, promote conference and talks in social media or just share happy feelings with friends. In this point I’m comparing this conference with some Polish conferences, where even free entrance conferences are able to offer gadgets such as consoles, software licenses, books, iPads etc.
Rating talks feature on iOS app could be visible better (it is hidden at the talk details screen at the bottom of the page).

As a community driven conference I would like to congratulate and thank you to javaBin community for such great event!