From the 24th to the 26th of September the Joomla!Day 2009 was held in Bad Nauheim/Germany. During some surfing on the net I all of a sudden found the announcement somewhere and checked the website. Although the ticket was quite expensive I decided to go there on the Saturday. The first two days were dedicated to more commercial topics but the agenda for the Community Day read good to me.

What should I expect?

My active time in software development is quite some years ago now and honestly I was expecting that I end up in  a group of nerds where I would be the senior - because of my age! But I was happy to see that there were at least ten people older than me.

My first impression was positive: a very nice hotel and excellent coffee. I saw some people that I knew from my Joomla! library and the opening really looked promising. There was an open discussion about the topics and after the agenda was agreed upon the first presentation started.

Multi-language support required

The first presentation was given by Akarawuth Tamrareang from Thailand and was supposed to cover the situation and progress of Joomla! 1.6. What should I say: I didn't understand very much. I read the slides and listened as good as possible. But - no offense - Akawaruth's English was not made for my German ears. This was a missed opportunity.

The next two presentations were given in very clear English. Johan Janssens introduced the Nooku framework and Brian Teeman provided some insight into security vulnerabilities of Joomla! This was very hands-on and I of course immediately checked all this on all of my installations.

Open discussions

Before the lunch break we had the opportunity to discuss several individual topics directly with the developers. I spent some time with the JoomFish team and Johan Janssens  asking my questions and listening to the discussions. Unfortunately I missed several other tables because I spent too much time at the JoomFish station.

What else?

During the conference I had the time to observe a rather funny thing. I never saw so many IS experts struggling so much with the IT systems. The beamer resolution was always a problem, the different hardware platforms too. The program for the afternoon was announced on some brown paper that was impossible to read from more than a meter away. And the hotel could obviously not provide an open WLAN for the conference.

At the end we found time to reflect the day and give feedback to the team. This was of course positive. And a few comments gave me the feeling that some participants see people like Brian Teeman and Johan Janssens like popstars. That was funny.

JoomlaDay 2010 - I'll be there

All in all it was a good experience, I learned a lot and met interesting people, not just popstars. And as the next conference is already announced I am sure I'll participate again.

Here some interesting links:

• Announcement of the JoomlaDay 2010 on Robert Deutz's blog
• Website of JoomlaDay 2009
• Website of the Nooku framework - look for Framework
• Brian Teeman's blog - a must read for all Joomla! disciples
• Brian's presentation on video - there is also a link to the presentation as slides