Spring one 4gx conference review

Last week I was able to visit the Spring One 4gx conference in Washington, D.C. SpringOne4gx is an annual conference made by Pivotal usually held in September each year but on different location in USA each time.

I have to share that this was the BEST conference I have attended to in my whole life. The conference was taking place at Marriott Marquis which was a cool place, the only big minus was that it was extremely cold, but I believe this is an issue about US in general (very warm outside and cold inside – yes it was strange indeed).

This was my first visit to USA so I had to say that I am not impressed, many poor peoples sleeping on the streets and at least 1 different crazy day each day (shooting with virtual rifle or talking to strangers and etc.) anyway if this is capitalism I don’t like it.

About the conference itself: the conference was in 4 days, the first day was mostly only, a keynote and registration + a diner. I have to say that the conference tickets was covering everything breakfast , lunch and diner and since I was there only 2 days more (one day for landing in Washington and 1 day leaving) I actually spend less then 100$. There was a keynote each day after the presentations (weird right?) but this turns out to be awesome since it was during or after diner and before the free sponsored drinks and was amazingly fun watching Josh Long and Dave Sawyer doing live coding while we eat.

The conference had 9 streams, yes thats correct 9! Of course half of them were related to Groovy and Grails so I didn’t visited any of them. The slots were 1 hour and 30 minutes long (a lot longer then the regular 45 minutes used in most conferences) and I have to say that I enjoyed this timing, since the presenter was able to show a lot more.

There was no single presentation about what is new in XX, see our new product and so on … 99% of the topics were about how to do something and 1% was about tricks when using something.

The whole conference was concentrated a lot about Cloud and Micro services and well I do liked a lot of what I saw and defenatly will use Eureka at some point. (google for Service Discovery Eureka).
There were 2 presentations about JavaScript I think and of course they were shown with some sort of spring integration or spring boot backend etc.

The keynote was EVERY night .. every night there was a keynote where, as I said, the live coding part was involving development of an application step by step.

On the second day we had a presentations made by our Petar Tahchiev about building ecommerce with spring. How spring helped us, what was our issues, how to we fixed them and etc. of course 1 hour was not enoughh, but most people liked the presentation.

Here is a photo of our great team:

Also I have to say that there will be videos of everything (except the keynote I guess) in the next 1-6 months available to everyone so search for spring one 4gx videos regularly.

I definitely advice you to visit springone4gx if you can next year, or if you are in Europe like me at least visit the Spring IO conference in Spain which was also quite good.