Here are some impressions/things I've learned. Please note that this blog entry is not only written in English because everything else is written in English but also because the conference language was English.
The location:
The Unconference was at Lantenhammer Erlebnisdestillerie, Josef-Lantenhammer-Platz 1, 83734 Hausham / Germany. Yes, this was a real distillery but there was no distilling during this weekend.
At the distillery we had two "rooms":
At the stills
Barrel Balcony
As you have may seen from the images there were no projectors but some flip charts.
A note about accommodation. At the location itself (this means within walking distance) there are no hotels but only some guestrooms. As soon as you are able to drive some kilometers you get plenty of hotels.
Warmup:
At the Friday evening there was a spontaneous get together at a restaurant in a nearby village. The menu was typical Bavarian. That meant a lot of meat meals which was good for me but not for the vegetarians.
Conference format:
This was an Unconference. So there were no predefined tracks and speaker but every attendee was invited to offer or request some topics to talk about. Each morning we created a list of topics for talks and then voted for them. The most popular made it into the talks set for the day.
First day:
The schedule of the first day:
The first talk I've visited was about build tools. Here I've learned that Gradle was rewritten from Groovy to Java. This broke some features what upset previous users.
At next I've listened to Sven Rupperts talks about "Functional Patterns with Core Java". He introduced his functional-reactive-lib. For the german readers there are some articles at jaxenter.
After lunch I've visited "Java after eight" by Dmitry. Here I've learned that Java 9 isn't a LTS release but Java 11. So with the release of Java 10 next month it will be outdated. Skipping the non LTS release may also not be the best thing to do as any feature can be deprecated by a normal release and removed by the following normal release. So when switching from one LTS release to the other features may be missing. If you are now as shocked as I was then you may want to watch these two talks from fosdem. The State of OpenJDK and OpenJDK Governing Board Q&A. In the later one listen for Mark Reinhold saying "And how much do you pay them."
As the last talk we discussed what the next thing to learn is. The conclusion was that Java may be outdated but the JVM will live.
Evening events:
After the talks we got a tour through the distillery where every step in the production process was explained. In the end we got to taste some of the produced beeverages.
While this was the end at the distillery this wasn't the end for our day. We went some kilometers south and walked some hundred meters up to an Alm. After some good food we sledged down to the cars.
Second day:
The schedule of the second day:
The first and only talk at the second day was "Dealing with difficult people at work". This is for so many people a thing that nobody wanted a parallel talk.
In the second talk Simon introduced the concept of Mob programing. There the whole team programs at one problem. A concept I've never heard before.
Before lunch Andres explained the JCP and how the JCP Execute committee is elected and wanted some feedback from us.
After lunch I've took part in Event storming leaded by Zlatko and Gerd.
And for the last time slot of the day I've skipped the two talks and looked through the IoT box brought by Bernhard.