Attending conferences

Geertjan Wielenga: Was your introduction to traveling to conferences via Heinz's JCrete unconference?

Rabea Gransberger: Yes, in 2011 I was invited by Heinz and did travel to the first JCrete unconference.

There I got in touch with other developers who traveled to conferences. They were always asking, "Why don't you go to conferences as well and give a talk?"

I would reply, "But I don't have any ideas for talks because what I do at work is in a very specialized domain."

I didn't think that a talk that I gave would be interesting for the outside world. When you completely understand what you're doing, you feel that it's very boring and nobody else could possibly be interested.

My first talk was at EclipseCon Europe in 2012, which I did with a coworker of mine. That came about because we attended one of the Eclipse demo camps that are held when some new Eclipse version is released.

One evening, we were traveling to Hamburg to the demo camp and we were talking outside in a smoking area. There was another guy there and he was asking what we did for work. We said, "We're developing products based on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform and we're using the Eclipse Remote Application Platform to have the same code base for the desktop application and the web application. We're also investigating how to use Tabris."

At the time, Tabris was a platform that was bringing the same code base from the desktop to mobile devices, so it had a special way of "converting" the code to Android or iOS.

The stranger said, "That's very interesting because there's a lot of theory about using a single code base for having those three different user interfaces, but not many people are actually doing that. Would you be interested in giving a talk at EclipseCon Europe?"

That guy was Ralph Mueller, who was one of the chairpersons for the EclipseCon conferences at that time. We realized that nobody was doing what we were doing, so we gave our first talk.

That year, I started the Java User Group in Bremen. I had been looking for a Java User Group in Bremen for some time. I would go searching for it every couple of years, but there was no such group. So, I finally decided to create my own. It does still exist. I'm not the lead anymore because so much time goes into organizing that kind of stuff. Now we have an organization team with three other people involved.

Geertjan Wielenga: That's the best thing! The next phase is to hand it on to somebody else. Isn't that the perfect cycle?