Last month in early October, I attended the Java2Days conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. This being the first conference put on in the Balkans and one that reached out to an international set of speakers, I wasn’t expecting it to be any different than the other myriad of conferences. Boy was I wrong. The organizers put everything together so well, that each of the speakers and a lot of the attendees that I spoke with were impressed with the organization.

The event was over a two-day period and the speakers ranged from front-end web frameworks / j2ee to really slick talks on OSGi, Cloud, and distributed key-value storage (all the rage these days). The sessions were a bit on the short-side, and that meant a little trimming was involved in each talk, with only the most important information staying in. All the usual schwag was given out, with the addition of what I can only describe as “booth babes” walking around handing out little slips of the next two upcoming speakers while wearing matching devil / angel costumes. Awesome.

The organizers were so accommodating I think we all grew to love our visit to Sofia that much more. We were greeted at the airport and personally taken out for dinner when we arrived, and every night after that was some special event for the speakers. In fact, of my entire trip in Europe one of the most memorable was the dinner we had after the first conference day. It was great food, belly dancers, and a super festive crowd dancing for hours and hours. We all had a lot of fun throughout, and being taken care of during our stay, makes Java2Days the conference to attend for us next year.

Thanks again to all the organizers, speakers I met, and all who attended the conference.