Last week I spent three days in Kiev, Ukraine participating in a new but rapidly growing Java conference titled JEEConf.  The city of Kiev is more than 1500 years old, and will host the European Football Championship in two three weeks.  During the first two days I was running two hands-on classes: one on JavaScript and another – “Intro to Java EE 6”. The one-day class “JavaScript for Java Developers” was an intensive way to learn this interesting language that requires Java developers to re-think their way of programming. The Intro to Java EE is a quick way for people who know Core Java to get familiar with the server-side technologies. In the last moment, I threw in there some materials explaining what Ajax and JSON are. They’re not the part of Java EE just yet, but play an important part in the architecture of many of the real-world Web applications.

I’ve spent the third day at this 650-attendees-4-track conference. The organization of the event was excellent (thanks to the folks from XP Injection – a training center from Kiev). That day I was delivering a non-technical preso on “How to become a professional Java developer”. It was about how to prepare a resume, minimize failures during the technical interviews, what not to do while resigning… Long story short – it was about actively building your career.

This presentation was taken really well by the 400+ people in the attendance. After presenting for one hour I had to spend another 40 minutes in the corridor answering lots of questions. Even though the vast majority of the audience were appreciative my the honest coverage of how I see the complex game called “Looking for Job”, I need to say that there were a couple of people who didn’t get it. I’ve seen a comment stating that I was teaching people how to lie at the technical interview. It’s like accusing a football coach of teaching the team players how to make tricks with the ball.I guess, from their point of view, a player should hit the ball straight ensuring that the other team always know where the ball goes next.

I didn’t have problems explaining the audience how to negotiate their salary regardless of the fact that I’m recruiting people from Ukraine and these newly acquired skills can cost me. I call this a fair game. In about a month, the video of this presentation will be published at the conference’s Web site, and if you understand Russian, you can form your opinion of what it was about. The English-speaking audience can go through the Powerpoint slides. BTW, I delivered a similar presentation in Bangalore, India at the First Great Developer’s Conference three years ago.

I enjoyed being in Kiev, the city I’m originally from. I enjoyed talking to young Ukrainian developers. I enjoyed seeing how the audience participated in discussions in English with the world-class speakers well known in the Java community (Arun Gupta, Sander Mak, Dejan Bosanac). I enjoyed being at this young, but very promising Java event. You can find photos and more of the feedbacks about JEEConf over here.

Thanks again to the conference organizers.   IMHO, it would be nice if next year you’d create and maintain a full English version of JEEConf’s Web site. Keep growing guys!