Trip Report: Experten Forum Stuttgart 2015

You probably recognized the lack of new posts during the last weeks. Sorry for that! I was really busy preparing my workshop for the Experten Forum Stuttgart 2015 which took place on July 10th. I had the pleasure to give a 3 hour long workshop about JPA and Hibernate performance. I really enjoyed it! The organization was great, the attendees asked interesting questions and I met lots of interesting people. But lets start at the beginning …

The Conference

The Experten Forum Stuttgart is a 1 day long conference with 12 workshops in 6 parallel tracks, each of them 3 hours long. With 6 talks in parallel, the attendees had several topics to choose from, ranging from software development to project management and soft skills.

My Workshop

I gave my workshop at the afternoon and talked about detecting performance problems, their most common reasons and how to solve them by e.g. activating the right logging, choosing a good fetch strategy for the specific use case and using caches. I uploaded the german slides on slideshare. Sorry to all my english readers for now but I’m already working on something for you (see future projects).

The good thing about a workshop compared to a normal conference talk is the increased amount of time (of course) and the conversations with the attendees. There is not much time to discuss questions in a 45-60 minutes talk but there is plenty of it in a 3 hour workshop. This makes the workshop more fun for everyone and provides a better learning experience for the attendees. And the attendees at the EFS used their time well. We had lots of interesting discussions during and after the workshop. I really enjoyed it and hope that I can come back next year.

Upcoming talks

There are a few other chances this year to see me speak about JPA and Hibernate performance and/or meet me in person, if you missed the EFS2015. I will give:

a 1-day workshop about JPA and Hibernate performance at the Workshop-Tage 2015 in Zurich at September 2nd,
a talk at the Java Forum Nord in Hannover at October 6th and
I have submitted my talk to one additional conference that didn’t select their speakers so far and I’m considering some other conferences. I will tell you about it as soon as there are any news.

Future projects

But the talks are not the only things I am currently working on and that I didn’t write about so far. I teamed up with a company in Munich to give a 2 days long JPA and Hibernate performance training on 1-2 December, 2015. The training will be in german or english, depending on preference of the attendees. The description of the training is not published so far but I was told that it will be done soon. If you like to learn more about it or even reserve your spot, send me an email to training(at)thoughts-on-java(dot)org.

The second big project I’m working on is good news for everyone who can’t attend the training in Munich but wants to learn more about Hibernate and JPA performance. I am creating an online course that will be basically the same as the classroom training in Munich. The general idea is to provide two days of training as on demand videos and exercises together with a forum and Q&A sessions to discuss your questions. You can signup below to get updates and the chance of early sneak peaks during the creation process.