JavaOne ‘07 - Day 2
Well I survived the first day of working the booth. Our signs all showed up and everything looked great. We had 1000 slinkys to give away with our logo on one side and the phrase "Scale for Spring" on the other. I predicted we’d only give away 300 and our VP of sales predicted 500. I thought slinkys were a little passe, but I was completely wrong. Those things were flying off our table. I couldn’t unpack boxes fast enough. Apparently, programmers love slinkys- like, really really love them. We got a lot of foot traffic from people who heard our booth had slinkys, so the marketing guys were right about that, and I was not.
One interesting issue we dealt with was the contact reader. It’s a little handheld PDA that has an RFID reader in it. Everyone’s show pass has a smart card in it so as they talk to us we can scan it and get contact info. Well, our reader crashed. It was provided by the show and was running Windows. I found that odd at a JavaOne show, especially when they’re making big Java ME announcements. You’d think they’d want all their handheld devices running their own platform. We probably lost 30 or so contacts because of that. We were given a replacement and made do, but it was kind of lame.
Other than that, I’ve learned to never work a booth unless it has the extra carpet padding in your booth area. My feet and back are sore. It’s hard work to stand and talk to people all day, but I did get into some interesting discussions about the difference between Appistry and other solutions like TerraCotta. That was fun. We definitely have some distinguishing features besides slinkys. At the end of the day, Rod Johnson came by to take a look at our Spring integration code. I opened eclipse and showed him the project we were running and he was impressively good with the hotkeys. He knew things I didn’t and was flying around pretty fast.
All in all, it was a good day. I wish I could have made it to a couple of sessions, but I was so busy talking about our software with people, I didn’t have time. Maybe tomorrow I’ll make it to a couple. There are a lot of interesting topics at the show. They do a great job of getting a diverse group of speakers. I would definitely recommend this show to anyone looking to see what the latest java related technologies are in any area.
Now I’m going to get some sleep,
-j
