ApacheCon EU next week

Like many others, next week I'll be in Amsterdam attending ApacheCon EU. This is my fourth ApacheCon, and it seems like every time I get myself involved with more stuff to do and more people to meet. I'm still trying to piece together my schedule for the week, but here's what I'll be doing already on Monday and Tuesday.

Monday: Media training, BarCode

On Monday I'll be attending Sally Khudairi's Media & Analyst Training and Intermediate Media & Analyst Training classes to improve my media skills and knowledge. I attended the first class already once during ApacheCon US 2006 in Austin, and found it very interesting and useful. Now I'm hoping to rehash the things I learned earlier and learn something new during the second class in the afternoon. It's really cool and very useful to have something like this as a part of the conference.

The downside of attending the classes is that I miss much of the Hackathon action during Monday. But luckily there's the BarCode event where (if not sooner) I hope to catch up with Day people and other fellow hackers. The conference networking site has already helped me hook up with some new people I'd like to meet.

Tuesday: JCR meetup, WebDAV, hacking, dinner

Tuesday is the first big JCR day of the week. The JCR meetup starts at 9am and continues to 1pm with lots of cool topics and attendees. The event is free for everyone and takes place right next to the ApacheCon venue, so feel free to drop by if you're around and interested in JCR and related technologies!

I'm especially looking forward to the JCR content modeling workshop that we'll likely organize at the end of the meetup. Besides ideas and questions from existing JCR users, I've invited other Apache projects like Abdera, James, JSPWiki, Lenya, and Roller to participate if they're interested in evaluating how a JCR content repository could best support their content models.

After the JCR meetup I was thinking of perhaps putting up a short informal WebDAV library BOF with anyone interested who's around. There's a long-standing need for a good WebDAV protocol library but with Slide gone, there currently is no clear development community that could adopt the various pieces of WebDAV code in different Apache projects. It would be cool if there were enough interest for example to bootstrap a new incubating WebDAV project.

If I have time (and energy!) beyond those activities on Tuesday afternoon, you'll probably find me in the Hackathon working on some prototype integrations like the ones we've done in previous Hackathons. Ping me if you're interested in hooking some code up especially with Jackrabbit or Tika!

There's an initial plan of having a dinner with other JCR people on Tuesday evening. Let me know if you're interested in joining us.