I’m finally back from my first two days at JavaOne. The first day, day zero, since all the official JavaOne stuff really starts in full swing on Tuesday (today), was a really busy day. All at the same time JavaOne sessions, Startup Camp and CommunityOne were happening. Most of the Joyent crew including Joyuer’s Mark Mayo and Derek Crudgington, were at StartupCamp while I was over at CommunityOne. CommunityOne itself was a real challenge because so many great sessions were happening in parallel that you had to slip into one, then slide out half way through to try and get it all in. But, better too much of a good thing than the reverse.

I gave the first session in the OpenSolaris track. It was awesome to have a non-Sun community speaker give one of the sessions, it was even more awesome to be that speaker. They put me up in the largest room they had for sessions, seating over 1,000 people. The turn out was good but in such a massive room it looked super sparse (maybe 100 or so people?). It was a unique experience to present with two projectors on a big podium stage and full AV crew in the room. It was fun getting mic’ed up and such. Everyone was really pro and helpful getting me acustom to how things with with timers and timing lights and stuff. (They have 3 lights to indicate how close your coming to the end of your session time.)

So my session was given the ambitious title (not chosen by me) Introduction to the OpenSolaris Operating System, but I was given only 55 minutes to present. I’m glad to say that I made it through it, albeit at a blistering pace, and only went over my time by 35 seconds. My slides are online as Flash or PDF: Introduction to the OpenSolaris Operating System Slides. You’ll notice there is A LOT thats missing… but given the audience, title, and time limit I needed to thin down anywhere I could and address the talk toward a predominantly Java developer crowd, and so I focused on technologies that I believe (and use at Joyent) are fundamentally essential Solaris technologies for web deployment and bringing my answer to the “Does the OS matter?” question of yore.

Thanks to Jim for snapping some photo’s. Find his whole library of photos from JavaOne in his Flikr gallery.

One thing thats fun about JavaOne is how many people in the Solaris organization are present. I won’t even bother naming names, the list is too long, but its really like a big party chatting with folks you haven’t seen in a while, catching up, swapping stories and making new connections with interesting people… oh, and customers too. I know its called “JavaOne” but its really so much more than just a Java conference and it really has become the event of the year.

One name I will drop is Glynn Foster. Super kool guy… I knew he was a great pick for the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) but after swapping some notes and talking about things a bit I realize he’s a much better balance to the board than I previously realized.

JavaOne has been a blast. Having my fellow Joyeur’s Mark and Derek in California has been awesome. So far we’re two days into the week and a great week its been. Tomorrow I’ll be away from the show while we have some Joyent Systems Team meetings on direction and dig deep into solving some real interesting issues that we need to solve in the way we manage our Accelerator product (I really wish I could talk about those things, really fascinating stuff that we’re doing with Solaris Containers, far beyond what anyone else imagines doing with them and managing them, but we do have to have some secret sauce for now). On Thursday I’ll be back at the show, so if your in the Bay Area or at the show just head toward the Sun booth and look for the guy in the kilt.

Also, quick plug, if your at the show please come by the Joyent booth and talk with us about Startup Essentials and Glassfish hosting! Glassfish rules and I really want to make Joyent Accelerator’s the premier hosted Glassfish solution!