In the company where I work, a lot of web projects are done with Groovy and Grails. So I asked my company to visit GR8Conf 2019 to get more insights into the Groovy-World. GR8Conf was a developer conference at the IT-University of Copenhagen which is all about Groovy and related topics – “All Things Groovy”.
The conference took place from 27 - 29 May 2019 and I and a work colleague were allowed to be there. There were three/four slots every day with different lectures and workshops. After the first day there was something called Hackergarten (I didn’t join). It was a meetup where people contribute to open source projects together. After the second day there was a Meet & Greet
It was a smaller conference with about 100 attendees, but nice, because a lot of the core contributors of the ecosystem were present and you could talk to people easily. I remember talking to the GR8Conf co-founder and organizer Søren Berg Glasius and that he recommended Spock Framework for testing our applications.
On day one the keynote “Security and Deception – Lessons from a professional Liar” from Michael Garducci was about how important security is for developers. There must be a balance between security and usability (e .g. login messages stating not "incorrect username" but "incorrect username or password", otherwise it would be easy to find out usernames or e-mail addresses). The keynote was particularly memorable because many things were illustrated using magic tricks. The video from the keynote is on YouTube.
There were a lot of interesting talks which I joined and I have notes of. Also a lot of talks about Micronaut - a Java Framework for microservices and serverless applications – because it was pretty new at that time (released in 2018). I also joined a workshop for beginners about Micronaut.
The conference was groovy to get insights into the Groovy world and learn new things. The organization was great, the food delicious and the presents creative (a shirt and a cup with El Groovyssimo on it).
On September 1, 2022 it was announced that - after a two-year break due to the COVID-19 pandemic - the conference for 2022 would be canceled and discontinued.
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