SpringOne 2020

SpringOne one of my favorite conferences. Sure, it’s not as big or glamours as VMWorld or Ignite. But there is more excitement. This year SpringOne was different than any previous years. This was the first year after the VMware acquisition of Pivotal. This was also the year where most (if not all) conferences were remote.

The remote aspects of this conference was much different than before. They had something like eight tracks instead of the usual thirteen. The conference was free. This made is available to all who could take the time and watch. This part of the conference was the best. Making the knowledge available to all as it happened. There were also question and answer section after each talk. This filled the hallway post talk question time. That time you grabbed the speaker after their talk in the hall to ask a question.

Slack was integral to this whole event. With an open Slack with channels for all the tracks. You missed something wanted to see who else was there. Slack was a great added touch for this conference. For me, I got to catch up with some of my friends from the Steeltoe team. But what is SpringOne with out Twitter? This year being all virtual made no difference. Most sane people stay off Twitter but during SpringOne and even the week prior, we all get on. We promote talks, and give feed back in real time.

What SpringOne missed and missed hard this year was the personal interactions. Running into people in the hall. Dinner and drinks with friends and even breakfast with a client. This was the part of the virtual conference cannot replace. Now that being said there was a lot of food and coffee given away via GrubHub. Which was nice but it doesn’t make up for missing karaoke.

The vibe this year was different as well. This wasn’t a Pivotal event this was a VMware event. And as they haven’t yet rolled SpringOne in to VMWorld yet. They did schedule the next two or three SpringOne conferences before the acquisitions. So we don’t know if they will keep SpringOne or roll this in to VMWorld. The focus was a lot more on the products rather than the outcomes. This was a big difference than before. Pivotal was all about outcomes. This is the way to build cloud-native apps here is the best way you can do it and by the way here is our products. Where as now it was here is Tanzu and you can build apps to it, if you have the right number of other products to support it.

Spring was still front and center to this conference. Which is fine the conference is named after it. A lot of new features and ways to integrate with other VMware products using Spring. This was all expected. Spring Azure which is now GA was also highlighted very well at SpringOne. This gives the Spring experience on Azure. I was able to take this for a test drive last year and this is an amazing product. Like every year .NET and Steeltoe got a mention. This year .NET and Steeltoe didn’t get as much fanfare as previous years. This is unfortunate but understandable there isn’t a SKU for Steeltoe like Spring. Remember a lot of Steeltoe runs in a lot of places with or without Tanzu.

SpringOne was still great to get away from everyday work and take the time to log on learn something new. The team who put this together did an amazing job. Considering last minute virtual conferences due to a pandemic isn’t something we see. It was a great conference with a different vibe and a different format. I would still love to see an in person SpringOne and maybe keep SpringOne Tour virtual like this. To all who put this together thank you, for all your hard work and dedication.