Blog.Project13.pl

Amazing days and awesome people

It’s been some amazing days for me during (and before) the NBPTraining. As you probably know already – I’ve been the “one-man-army” behind the organization and basically everything around this training. I got lots of help from various people, such as Dr Jarosław Wąs (from KN Glider) – it wouldn’t have been possible to make this training such an success without his great and very active support. And of course – the PolishJUG, which I’m a proud member of! :-) But one thing I have to admit, Bureaucracy is a horrible thing and really made some things (needlessly…) difficult – thank goodness in the end, we had everything well organized – as Geertjan put it on dZone:

[...] There are also some illustrative pics to share, to give an impression of the group (really large), the trainers (really busy), and the organization (really good) [...]

Day 0: Welcome Dinner

What’s so worth mentioning about the guys just coming here anyway? Well it was a quite trip for some, especially Geertian, who had to come by train which took him about 27hours instead of just coming by car from Prague. All because of Eyjafjoell‘s eruption last week… And Toni and Geertjan were in Oslo at that time, doing a Training for an company (btw nice interview with Gunnar Reinseth) – so we were worried if they’ll be able to come to Poland due to all the flights being cancelled… Anton was lucky and but Geertjan’s original flight got cancelled… Well, he had quite an interesting journey as he called it himself :-) Later when Karol joined us and soon we all went to eat some pierogi and chat a little :-)

Days 1 & 2: The Training

Thanks to dr Wąs everything went smooth and without any problems… Even though some other students also wanted to use the room we had reserved – due to the chaos caused by the tragic plane accident and them wanting to make up for the classes they’ve lost last weekend due to the burial ceremonies… I’m really glad we managed to get the training rolling with absolutely no problems – we were really prepared for everything, along with backup projectors etc ;-)

If you’re not very familiar with the Java World – please note, that the training was NOT about NetBeans IDE. Yeah, we did use NetBeans IDE (there’s some nice little helpers/wizards), but that’s absolutely not a must – NBP is pure Java (just a bunch of jar’s) and XML – so you can use anything you want to code stuff based on NetBeans RCP. That said, the training was about real coding stuff such as patters used in the RCP, use-cases and “ how do I code such a feature  to scale well?”.

The agenda was the basic NetBeans Platform Training as outlined on http://edu.netbeans.org/courses/nbplatform-certified-training/ that’s a good thing, as only a few students actually have used the NetBeans RCP (or even ANY RCP) in their lives. The level of participants was quite diverse, some saw loose coupling in action for the first time in their lives, and others were already planing some advanced use-cases foe the things we were learning. The sources and videos for most of the examples are also hosted on netbeans.edu.pl, so if you want to know what you’ve missed, feel free to download/watch them (if interested in FullHD versions, contact me per email). The Lookup and Nodes/Explorer Views were the most interesting features of the platform I guess. Of course having an full blown app with menus etc out of the box is also nice, but not a “life changer” if it weren’t for those mechanisms. Sadly we didn’t talk about the Lexer API (for parsing languages) but I personally talked with the guys a little about it – and why schielmann was dropped etc… A really fun and interesting insider talk :-) I simply love such conversations…

After the training Geertjan gave away a copy of his book (“Rich Client Programming”), to the person who asked the best, most interesting questions during the course. Of course it was then signed by all the trainers. Sadly I don’t have a picture of the books’ winner, nonetheless – congratulations! After the training I also asked the guys to sign my copy of the book, hurray for signature collectors ;-)

Anyone interested in some of the response I got concerning the training? After the training plenty of you mailed me and thanked via forums etc, here’s a few responses:

przyznaje, na prawde baaaardzo fajne szkolenie

Faktycznie – świetna robota. Wielkie dzięki ;)

Tru. Gj.

[...] nie udalo mi sie zjawic a slyszalem ze bylo super ;/

[...] bedzie problemem jesli przyjde jutro na to szkolenie NetBeans’a? Bo slyszalam ze duzo ciekawych i przydatnych dla mnie rzeczy jest wiec chcialabym sobie posluchac :)

See you next time!

I hope you all enjoined the training – we certainly did. I’ve got some opinions from happy participants, so I guess everyone liked it as much as those did.

If you have anything (opinions, sources or even complaints) feel free to contact me: kmalawski@project13.pl or just leave a comment here :-) Also, when you get your NetBeans Certified Engineer and would like some more promotion for your open source project – let me know and we’ll add a link to it at netbeans.edu.pl!

Some students have already  have started their projects based on the NetBeans Platform – so what are you waiting for?! ;-)

What’s next for me?

Well, I’m going to GeeCON, to learn about Gradle, and tap into facts and myths about JSF and other things (the list of good topics is really long so I wont list them all here, just have a look on your own). The agenda mostly caught up my attecion and I’m really happy to be going there. What’s new for me + conferences is that I don’t have to go alone anymore. I’m going with a friend (some years older) and potentialy another girl – as she won the Google trip to GeeCON… ;-) I’m also really happy to be able to meet Adam Dudczak, thanks to whom the whole NBPT idea got ignited in me and the NetBeans Guys :-) Of course we’ll meet up  with all the PolishJUG members, (Adrian Nowak, Radosław Holewa, Marcin Gadamer and Kuba Dżon) and Miroslav will be comming too – lot’s and lot’s of programming-friends :-) Seems like Toni and Geertjan will also be comming, yay! Yeah, so that’ll be 3 days in May… but that’s not the end of my Java related stuff in May:

Later in May I’ll be on an Spring Source Training. It’s only the “short introductory one”, and I’m well aware that it won’t make me an spring-guru, but an insider insight about Spring, Roo or Grails is also a good thing to have.

By the way, did you notice that the netbeans.edu.pl is running on Grails? I’ll release it’s sources when they’re polished enough~! Viva la free software.

Geertjan, Toni, Konrad (me), Karol

Oh, and for those asking: Sadly I didn’t own an PolishJUG T-Shirt at the time of the training, so I took the most Java related I had – from Java Developers Day. Also a quite nice conference… :-)