I don’t know how about you, but if I have to attend only a single conference next year, it is going to be GR8Conf EU. 100%. For various reasons.

First of all, if you are interested in the Groovy programming language or any of the Groovy-based technologies, there is no better place to be. You can meet in person core contributors of Groovy, Grails, Micronaut, Geb, Spock, Codenarc, Testcontainers, Ratpack, and many, many others. You can learn a lot directly from people who have the best hands-on experience in those technologies.

Secondly - the community. GR8Conf is not a crowded event where almost everyone is a stranger to others. I’m not skilled in networking, and I would even say that I’m terrible at it. That is why I feel like an outsider in most conferences. GR8Conf was different, however. I knew only 2 people in person, but it didn’t block me from having a great time with the people I just met in Copenhagen. Every single person I met was kind and friendly. I spent hours talking about different things, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I would say that GR8Conf, in this case, has much more from the friendly community meetup, instead of a large conference.

The 3rd reason is the content. I learned something new from every talk I had a pleasure to attend. I don’t go to many conferences these days, because they are usually full of advocate- or/and marketing-oriented talks. I prefer much more talks prepared by practitioners - people who experienced tons of different weird use cases, and they are willing to share them with others. Almost every presentation I saw at GR8Conf was like that. It didn’t have to be perfectly crafted - it was about valuable lessons speakers trying to share with us. Kudos for that!

#gr8conf EU 2019 is over. Many thanks to all good people who made this beautiful event possible - organizers, sponsors, attendees, and speakers who traveled from all around the world. You made Copenhagen a capitol of @ApacheGroovy for the last 3 days. It was a pleasure (1/2) pic.twitter.com/CJWK6k3Mfa — Szymon Stepniak 🧔🏻 (@wololock) May 29, 2019

And the last but not least - a generally great experience. Three-Day long conferences are usually pretty exhausting. They sometimes suffer from logistic and technical issues. I don’t know how it was in the previous years, but GR8Conf EU 2019 was free from such problems. I wasn’t tired at any time at the conference. I enjoyed every moment of it. I met many positive and friendly people who made my time at the conference very pleasant. Also, the organizers did a great job making the whole experience as smooth as possible. They paid attention to every small detail - this is how you make your attendees happy.

These are the reasons why I can’t wait for the 2020’s edition. Many good things will happen in the upcoming year in the Groovy ecosystem - I guess those things will inspire people to prepare excellent talks and share their experience. I will be there, no doubt about that. If you use anything from the Groovy ecosystem and you are interested in all those GR8 things, you should definitely consider attending GR8Conf EU next year. I won’t regret it I can guarantee!