I just sent out an email to the illustrious members of my Java User Group (JUG), aka the Baltimore Washington Java Meetup. The text is below. All those interested in Java technology are invited and welcome!
Well well well! What an AMAZING night we had for our November meetup! I’ve been remiss to have not sent this sooner – things have been busy busy busy in Steve world – but you should know that November 10th was an amazing night. We had about a billion people there – well, ok, perhaps it wasn’t a billion, but in all seriousness we maxed out the room – and it was all to hear the most excellent presentation by our very own rock star, Markus Dale, and his Overview of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its Java API. On hand were many illustrious members of our meetup, plus some additional celebrities, namely AWS’s Walt Whitecotton, John Peterson, and John Quarentello, who brought plenty of Amazon swag with them as giveaways and door prizes.
Speaking of the door prizes … the questions were:
1) Do you use (circle all that apply) (a) Ant, (b)Maven, (c)Jenkins, (d) Hudson?
Every answer was selected and there was a write-in or two for Gradle. But the hands-down leading choice was Maven.
This question was posed at JavaOne to a room of about 200 developers. By a show of hands, about half used Jenkins, half Maven, and two people use Ant.
2) An annotation can be extended: (a) True (b) False
The correct answer is false! Now … should they be extendable? Well that’s a different question altogether. But in the meantime –
Congratulations to all the winners, especially Peter Stamboulis who won the 1st place price, a gift card for Amazon Web Services!
Most of all, a great big thank you and “bravo!” to Markus Dale, who clearly knows his stuff and did a fantastic edge-of-your-seat presentation on one of the hottest cutting-edge topics in the IT field today.
SO … our next meetup is … TONIGHT! As we’ve been saying this fall, our December meetup would be non-standard, not a technical session, and that’s definitely the case this evening! We are simply meeting for dinner at a great restaurant in Columbia – pay your own way – click here for details.
In 2016 we’ll resume with technical sessions and already have a few in the works: Lambdas, data streams, new features in Java 9, our own participation in the Adopt-A-JSR effort, and more!
But for tonight, we’re having a fun holiday dinner (pay your own way!), and everyone is invited!
See you tonight!
– Steve