JavaOne Prep

I'm back in San Francisco this week in the familiar downtown area near the Moscone Center where JavaOne is being held. It wasn't that long ago when I was here at the same spot for GDC, and now I'm back for another first time experience. I've never been to JavaOne before, and what better way to gain my first exposure to it than as a first class citizen (speaker).

If you haven't already seen it, John already gave an excellent run down of the Project Darkstar related activities in the Project Darkstar team blog. At the risk of sounding repetitive, I'll be participating in three of those events this week:

• On Tuesday, I'll be running a hands on lab on Project Darkstar. The lab will essentially be a step-by-step tutorial on coding up the Project Snowman game. I just zipped through the actual lab on the actual lab machines earlier this afternoon and I think it's going to turn out to be a pretty fun lab.
• On Wednesday, I'll be giving a newly tweaked version of my Project Darkstar technical talk. Taking a queue from Brian (award winning high school history teacher), I've worked in some verbal sci-fi references to go along with the visuals. This should make it awesome.
• On Thursday, I've been tagged to do a quickie podcast in the JavaOne Community Corner. I think it will be a pretty informal chat about Project Darkstar.

So those are my responsibilities this week. Other than that, I've scoped out and signed up for some other sessions that peaked my interest, including among others one on Hudson, a few on unit testing, and a couple being given by the Java veteran Josh Bloch. Then there are the keynotes, general sessions, Java Pavilion, and probably too many other events going on for me to keep track of. And of course I'll try (and most certainly fail) at keeping up with the host of parties and bashes going on in the evenings.

It will be a busy week ahead but I'm pretty excited about it. To be honest, a part of me was dreading this event. Mostly because I'm not a very outspoken person, and often like to keep to the shadows. Being put front and center for these sessions is essentially way outside of my comfort zone. I was also talking to Katy last night about how travelling can be draining for me. Between Austin, GDC, and now JavaOne, this is the third time I've travelled in a year's time. Small potatoes for some, but the most ever for me. Now that I'm here, though, I'm ready for the challenge and am looking forward to a successful (and fun!) week at JavaOne. Maybe I'll see you there...