Right after Joker 2018 I was approached by one of the speakers Ivan Ugliansky with a very interesting proposal – “Hey, you know I’m from Novosibirsk, we have quite a big conference named CodeFest happening usually in the end of March. Would you like to come to Siberia?”. I answered – “This will be an honor for me!”.
It took me about 12 hours to reach Novosibirsk from Sofia. First 3h30m from Sofia to Moscow. Then I had my shortest night for this year – we took off at 21:30 MSK and landed 5:30 NSK time. The time passed quickly, the Aeroflot flight attendants were we so beautiful, that all of my attention mainly focused on them.
When we landed in Novosibirsk, I just couldn’t stop staring at my GPS position. Wow, I’m almost in the middle of Eurasia!
The first day was quite intense! My great friend Ivan has made a wonderful excursion to a place named “Akademgorod”. In English this may sound like “academics village”. It was created from scratch bak in the 60s to accommodate Soviet workers of science in a very peaceful close to nature environments. As a result it has transformed in a huge scientific cluster. A lot of institutes and research laboratories are now located there. There is also a huge university.
Students and specialists from all over Siberia and even Russia come to this place for study and cool projects!
No surprise, there is a big IT presence here. A lot of Russian and not only Russian companies have their R&D here, and no surprise the CodeFest conference gathers more than 3k attendees.
I had the privilege to be invited to the office of JetBrains
and the office of ExcelsiorJET
I had some truly wonderful time there! We had some pizza and great chat! Huge thanks to Ivan for being such a great host.
The end of the day was dedicated to a special event – the local JUG meetup. Together with Paul Finkelstein I had the honor to give my talk about Java and JPU in front of the local community. The event took place on the 22nd floor in the office of the famous Russian company 2GIS. The location was really awesome!
More than 150 people come to the event! It was fully packed with even standing people!
To be honest, I was a bit scared to be in front of these people. Siberian developers are famous to be the most hardcore developers in the world. Mostly the strongest compiler writers. Isn’t my talk going to be too smoothy for them? At the end of it I was happy to find out that it was really ok! I had a lot of questions afterwards!
It was a sincere pleasure to talk to this community!
The next day was the first day of the CodeFest. Luckily I had my talk scheduled for the day two. It was really good news for me, since I still had some jetlag.
So.. the conference is huge! It has 7 tracks and it is not focused only on Java.
Actually the variaty of technologies and a SC fields was a big plus for me. I learned a lot of new stuff. I think I was mostly stuck at the Data Science track. I’ve been playing a lot with tensorflow lately, so it was a natural choice for me.
I’ve heard some nice Project management and Team lead oriented talks as well.
I was even interview on the conference radio. I had a lovely chat with Vladimir Plizga from CFT.
The conf is huge!
The day one ended in the local pub with the concert of … the speakers! Singing about.. coding!! Awesome experience!
My talk was scheduled to be the first on day two.. I’ll be honest, I have expected no more than three people to show up. Three listeners would have been a victory for me!
Surprisingly.. it was almost packed for my Microprofile.io talk! (based on the MicroProfile.io tutorial created together with Ivan. St. Ivanov)
Every went smoothly! All of my demos worked! What a releaf!
Usually its not just giving a talk on CodeFest and you are free. After the talk there is an expert zone, where the speaker can make some live discussions and answer audience questions. I spent almost an hour there! I’m really happy that Microprofile.io enjoys so much interest! I hope it was useful for the audience!
The second part of the day I have decided to spend in the city exploring it.
The famous Transsib railway is crossing the big Siberian river Ob here.
The old and new come together!
The cultural life is very intense!
The famous Opera and Ballet theatre is really huge!
Siberia and Novosibirsk are definitely wonderful places to visit! If you have the chance to go there, you definitely should!
I’ve met really wonderful people and had some amazing time!
The next day I was in the airport having something I’ve almost missed – Siberian pelmeni!
Ok, I’m going home! Siberia, you are endless and beautiful!
Yet another 12000 km up in the air! (SOF-SVO-OVB-SVO-SOF)
Huge thanks to Ivan Ugliansky for making this possible.
In the beginning of this year I was quite skeptical, that I will make more then 2 conference, including the one I’m part of – jPrime.
But the end of the year was definitely very intense. After coming from St. Petersburg I had the pleasure to speak at several local events, including the oldest and most prominent local conference OpenFest. It was a great opportunity to meet not only Java programmers, but also to talk about different platforms and languages as well.
As I was in Oslo and St. Petersburg Ukrainian guys Andrii Rodionov and Oleg Dokuka approached me and invited me to submit a talk to the inaugural Devoxx Ukraine. So I did it, and very soon I’ve received an email saying I was accepted! Actually I was quite happy, since I haven’t been to Kiev for more than 5 years already.
The girls from the organisers helped me a lot to get all the invitations and was able to enter Ukraine without any problems!
By the way, that was the first time I had a direct flight to a conference, without any layovers. This is so much great! I’ve started appreciating this fact!
The conference takes place in a beautiful congress centre “Parkoviy”,
with a beautiful view of the Dnipro river. Well.. at this moment it was a foggy day (like the most of the days in November in Kiev)
The venue itself is very nice and modern..
There was even a car parked inside!
The entrance (or I would say – “the portal”) was extremely cool!
Actually the theme of the conference was like “You are in a spaceship!” which is really lovely.
Unfortunately I was there only for the second day. I’ve missed some cool sessions like the keynote by the famous scientist Lawrence Krauss. It’s also sad, that I’ve missed the BOFs at the end of the day, I’ve started enjoying them a lot. I like this live discussion that happens in between.
But what I definitely really enjoyed was the first session of the day two – “Software Engineering Theory vs. Practice: A Song of Ice and TireFire” by Baruch Sadogursky and Evgeny Borisov.
It’s not very much technically oriented, but the topic about the “Technological maturity” of a company is something I really have to dive in. I often find myself asking why we need this or another technology to solve current problem. Is the technology we’ve chosen able to solve this problem in the most efficient way and are our teams ready to implement it. Definitely a good talk!
Now I’m looking forward to see the videos of the talks I was not able to see. There were a lot of them running in parallel, the choice was hard!
As for my talk… the was a challenge for me: I had to talk in parallel with awesome Orkhan Gasimov, Doug Stevenson, Nakul Mishra, Reza Shiftehfar, Mary Grygleski .. and Dr. Venkat Subramaniam. But I was sincerely surprised when I had my room completely packed with extra chair and people standing..
So I’m very grateful for all people that have attended the talk! I hope that the attendees will find good application of the technology in their projects!
I’m happy to have received this awesome comment!
And as always – conference is meeting great people! And finally meeting them in person!
Like Michael Simons! Finally we have talked to each other in real life!
And Rafael Benevides with Dr. Venkat Subraniam
And many many more!!
As I was late to the lunch after my talk, I was arranged a special very Ukranian lunch made of borsch, vareniki and salo!
This definitely made this event very special for me! I’m really grateful to Alina and Irina for arranging it for me!
It was a wonderful conf. Made with all of the Devoxx traditions!
I had a lovely stay! I’m very grateful to everybody who made it possible!
It will be a bit strange to call this blog post a “Trip Report”, bearing in mind that I’m fairly local. Yep, technically I’m living in two homes – St. Petersburg, Russia and Sofia, Bulgaria. So coming to Joker was kinda switching home, but to make it more unified I’ll still call this post a “Trip Report”. A trip report to Joker Conference!
There is one disclaimer I have to make: in this post I do not follow any timeline. Here I just want to share some thoughts and emotions.
So, what is Joker Conference? This is Russia’s biggest Java event, which usually takes place at October/November in St. Petersburg. The city itself is now unofficially considered as a technological hub, accommodating a lot of IT offices and foreign representations. Like Oracle for example, they used to have a big R&D office in it. You may be surprised, but Java ME for example, or the biggest part of lambdas in Java 8 were created in St. Petersburg. Now, for some reasons, there is no more R&D, but some other activities. Still a lot of banks, telecoms, retailers, aerospace etc have some quite big R&D offices in St. Petersburg. The Universities produce a lot of very qualified developers to satisfy the huge needs for that.
So, as a result Joker is a big conference. There are usually about 1500 attendees.
The conference is run by JUGru group, and it is absolutely professionally organised.By professionally I mean that conference organisation is their main job. Joker was the first one guys&gals have made, now there are more than 15 conferences they manage. And they are not only Java oriented.
This was my fourth Joker Conference, and I kind of see its evolution.
For me it all started back in 2015 when it was held in one of the hotels and it was sincerely crowded, but starting from 2016 the conference moved to the Expoforum – a huge expo center near the Pulkovo airport. This venue definitely has opened some new possibilities like convenient transforming auditoriums, big expo and dining area. The venue is really one of the best I’ve seen in my vast “conference junkie” career.
The stage is cool!
And there is a lot of attendees!
The conference has mixed Russian/English set of sessions, so the speakers were also mixed local and foreign. The audience is mainly local. By local I mean Russian/Belorussian/Ukrainian/Kazahk – or in other words Russian–speaking. But the quantity of foreign speakers grows constantly trough the years, and I consider this as a good sign. All the visa barriers are handled gracefully by the JUGru team.
Russian conferences tend to focus on more hardcore topics. Just introduction talks receive the lowest scores. Russians prefer hardcore stuff! Yes, the talk should be hardcore, with a lot of deep dives, algorithms and case studies. If you can describe, for example, why your JVM consumes few bytes (or gigabytes) more than expected, and you know what experimental flag to put in the JVM params to stop it from doing this, describing in implementation details why this actually happens – this will be a cool talk! You may say, oh, isn’t it kinda JVMLS? Not exactly, dissecting Spring Boot or some Micronaut or Microprofile stuff is the expected topic. Not just knowing that the framework/technology can do this or that, but how actually it does it, and what are the corner cases causing unexpected bugs.
Yes, hardcore is highly tolerated! Why am I saying this? Actually I know this from the source. This year I had the honor and privilege to be invited as a member of the program committee. We had a wonderful team of eight – Gleb Smirnov, Victor Polischuk, Andrey Kogun, Oleg Anastasiev, Vladimir Sitnikov, Ivan Krylov, myself and first Valentina then Daria, to select the best possible talks for this conference. So, we were able to preview all the submissions, make rehearsals, make corrections in the talks, sometimes even redo the talks from scratch. Yes, you’ve got me right. On this conference (or actually on all JUGru conferences) the committee actively works with all the submissions and the speakers themselves. If you submit your talk to Joker – be prepared, that in few days someone from the committee will contact you and ask you for a rehearsal.
Many foreign developers find this weird. They usually say: “Hey, hey man, I gave my talks at JavaOne, Devoxx etc. I had my rooms packed. Why should I do a rehearsal?”. But at the end of the day, those who accepted to rehearse usually say: “Damn, that was so much useful! And the feedback you gave me is so valuable! And that was totally for free!”.
As a result – the content is very strong and nicely prepared!
This is one of the key aspects that makes this conference kind of unique – a very intense content preparation. Usually the committee starts its work half a year before the conference, and active rehearsals are made until almost the last day before the conference.
By the way, there was even special time slot for direct interaction with the program committee.
Another thing I’ve seen only on Joker are the discussion zones. Every speaker, after giving his talk, is usually invited to answer questions about his talk or continue the discussion. This usually lasts for an hour.
In case of Dr. Venkat Subramaniam and Josh Long those discussion zones have lasted up to three hours. People had so many questions, and they both were answering them all that time!
This year’s conference continues its growth not only in terms of quantity of attendees, but also in terms of activities. There were two additional stages set in the expo area, so that the companies a the booths are able to present some quickes at the breaks.
The booths were also full cool stuff.
Btw, unlike other conferences, it’s not easy to win a prize at these booths. To do this, you have to solve several weird programming problems, most of which are like puzzlers.
There were also so called experts areas set, where every attendee was able to ask the strangest questions about certain technology to the coolest programmers and solve their concrete issue! .. Or ask them to sign a book!
Everything was done to keep everybody busy till the late night (literally) the day one ended up with several cool BoFs. Together with Shelaev, Pangin and Chuyko we have hosted one of them regarding moving to Java 11.. And it was pretty cool! We had a very good discussion, with a lot of interaction, … and we were forcibly stopped, since this could have run all night long! I’m not totally sure whether the Java 11 was considered as a game changer, but one day we will have to migrate to it. The main discussion about it was, as expected, should we pay starting from now???
The activities at the conference hadn’t been strictly about knowledge but fun too, like a big exhibition of retro computers and games everyone could try playing.
As always the greatest part on each conference is meeting great people! I’m definitely happy I could meet Sebastien Blanc.
So much great to meet Gerrit Grunwald! I think the last time we have met was in SFO in 2015!
Together with the coolest Tagir Valeev watching Andrey Pangin’s talk.
With the so cool JBaruch (as a JFrog)!
It was great to meet with Ivan Uglyanslki from Novosibirsk!
A great honor for we was to meet in person Robert Scholte – one of the maven creators! It was also great to discuss the future of maven with him!
And we all had a lot of fun!
I liked a lot talking to John McClean not only about Functional programming but about Irish music as well.
It was very interesting to talk with foreign speakers not just about the technology, but also about Russia. The most of the speakers are for the first time in the country, and it is very delightful to hear that they like the town of St. Petersburg a lot! Some of them have said: “They show us different thing on the TV..”
And by the way (yes, yet another by the way), on this conference I was not only part of the committee, but also a speaker. I gave a talk about Microprofile.io based on the tutorial we have done together with Ivan St. Ivanov from our BGJUG. My session was scheduled as last of the day one. Surprisingly the room for 700 people was almost packed! Never thought so many people would like to dedicate their time on Friday evening for the ” bloody enterprise”.
I would like to say huge thanks everybody for coming! I hope this will be useful for your next projects! I liked the phrase several people have said – “Oh, this microprofile is like the light in the tunnel for the enterprise! This is great! It is so cool the technology is evolving so fast! And the community is there to help!”
At the end of the second day, as a final nontechnical keynote we all have listened to a very both interesting and strange talk about people’s digital mental health by famous in Russia Dr. Kurpatov.
Actually there were a lot of take-aways for me from this talk. I still keep training my personal multithreading, but at the same time I train the concentration on a particular important task I have to finish on time with great responsibility.
And the last but lot least thing I should mention – just before the conference, the previous day the world’s greatest java speaker Dr. Venkat Subramaniam gave his wonderful two (technically almost three) hours jug session. I was very happy to meet him after he came to jPrime to Bulgaria earlier this year. It was absolutely great to have his book signed for me! I’m feeling blessed now!
As expected, it was fully packed on this event!
Just to mention that this event took place at the Oracle office in St. Petersburg. Like every other building there it looks like a palace!
So, Joker was great! As always great! Getting more and more great!
Thanks Andrey!
Thank you Alexey!
And thanks to the team! It was huge honor and pleasure to be part of this event! Hope to see you next year!
Hmm, too few posts. I definitely have to change this. In my defence I’ll say, that only for this summer I’ve visited 12 countries. But you will argue, that for example Josh Long (my hero) made 12 countries only for this week, and he still has written several blog posts for this time. And you a right, I’m too lazy, I have to post more often!
Finally I’m in the local Starbucks, my cappuccino is ready, looks like it’s a perfect time to remember one of the greatest adventures of this year so far – JavaZone 2018!
When earlier this year, in May, I have received this email telling me that my talk “Java and the GPU: unlock the massive performance” was accepted for this year’s edition of JavaZone in Oslo, Norway, I literally jumped out of mu chair shouting out “Yes!!!”.
Visiting this conference was definitely one of my dreams, I’ve heard so many good words about it! Now finally this dream came true. Huge thanks to the committee for accepting my talk!
Finally September has arrived, I’ve landed in Oslo and literally fell in love with Norway from the first site!
An express train brought me from the airport directly to the Oslo central station for only 19 minutes. You may ask – so what? Actually the airport is about ~60 km away from the city and we were cruising with more 220 km/h. And those trains are scheduled to make this route every 10 min. This so cool!
For this conf choosing the train was the best choice, as the venue – Spectrum arena is just next to the central station. The hotel was there as well. So we were perfectly located.
Oslo welcomed us with a grey rainy weather
But just 20 min later it was beautiful and sunny, like in every northern town
In the evening we were invited to the speakers dinner that took place in a beautifully located restaurant with some stunning views of Oslo!
Oh, thats Chris Thalinger also making some photos of this wonderful sunset. By the way it’s raining.
Definitely a wonderful place to relax before the conference. We stayed there until late.
The next day was the first day of the conference. The first thing I saw was the looooong queue of the attendees.
The good (or may be the bad) part was that my talk was scheduled on for the second day. So the first day I had a chance to explore a little bit.
The conference organisation, or I may even say “architecture” is totally different from all other conferences I have attended. The venue is a huge arena, where big concerts take place. There is a big central area where you can find a lot of software company’s booths.
Just take a look how big is it and how many people are in!
The conference kick-off was lovely with some guitar players
The coolest part is that practically all the booth serve their own food all day long! Yes, yes.. you can have food all the time, all day long.. all two days! There was only one major problem for me – I couldn’t taste it all! I haven’t had enough capacity! Definitely OMG.
But not only food, but tons of other cool activities
One of the unique features of JavaZone are the 8 parallel tracks. Yep, 8! That’s a lot! The rooms are themselves not very big, but that makes the cozy.
That’s me attending Vlad Mihalcea’s great talk.
And like every conference the main reward is actually meet and talk to people! Hey, that’s Chris (..and Doug)!
My good friends Simon, Simon, Phillip and my new friend Jennifer
Finally could meet Sharat Chander in person!
Awesome hardcore JVM company of Doug, Volker and Steve
The discussions we had were really useful to me!
At the end of the day we had a wonderful hangout with David, Vincent and Matthew
Then actually came the funny part. My talk was scheduled for 9.00 the next morning. I was sincerely wondering who will ever be interested in GPUs and massive parallel computation so early in the morning? I was a bit nervious wen my talk was approaching.
But I was ready!
So I was expecting a maximum audience of 3 people to show up. What was my surprise when I found my room fully packed!
Oh My God! Absolutely unexpected!
I sincerely want to thank everybody that came. I hope the talk useful and fun to you!
By the way, it became available just few hours later in vimeo! Cool organisation at JavaZone!
When I was done with my talk I took the chance to hang around the beautiful city of Oslo!
Definitely a beautiful capital!
JavaZone 2018 was a great new experience for me! I’ve seen a cool organisation, met great friends and made great ones!
I want to say huge thanks to Rafael, Rustam, Mark and all the team for having me and making this conf a blast!
At the end as always my best five IMHO sessions of the conf from those I was able to see myself live:
Now I’m on may way watching the other talks I’ve missed (and those I’m able to understand)! They are just great!!!
So good bye Oslo! Thank you for being awesome! Hope to see you again!
I’ve watched all of the published ~180 videos from this year’s Devoxx Belgium. Not all of them till the end, but it was still pretty hard. Also, it’s great nice that the videos are published on the very next day.
This is my first trip report. I’ve never done any of this before, But I think now is a good time to start. And there is a nice reason for this! I had the chance to speak at Devoxx 2017!
Disclaimer: There will be a lot of Me, Myself and I in this post. Its not much technical. It’s just like sharing my own emotions. …I’ll call it a “smoothy post”. If you want to get straight down to my recommended talks (my post-event playlist!) skip to the end section.
Here I’d like to encourage you to attend this type of event, and your employers to support these initiatives. These events are great fuel for personal growth!
All the conferences…
I think the best introduction for this was done in the previous post, so I’ll just copy and pasted it below:
This year was quite a DE(VOXX)ED for me! First I had a chance to speak in wonderful Romania, then beautiful Vienna, after that amazing Lugano, then the loveliest Krakow, finally at the huge Antwerp event! In between I also gave some talks in my home towns Sofia –Java2Days and St. Petersburg – Joker! Let’s not forget that I was in the dreamteam of 5 to organize and run the coolest jPrime conf!
I’ve had quite an intense year!!! Each of these conferences deserves it’s own separate trip report. All of them were just wonderful!
However, I’ve focused on this event because, well, being selected as a speaker at Devoxx Belgium is quite an honоr! And at least twice as honorable to have two sessions!
This is my third time to the city of Antwerpen, but first time to Devoxx. I believe that every developer must go there at least once. Actually, even better would be to go every year! Just because everybody is there, almost all of the Java influencers! Not only can you just listen to the talks, but you can literally talk to them directly. This is what makes this conference truly unique, especially for Europe!
(Well I haven’t been to JavaZone yet. People say it has comparable by attendees count. I hope one day I will be able to go there as well.)
Unfortunately I was not able to be all the five days there, so I’ve missed all the Deep Dive sessions. I was only able to make the three last days, but it was still great!
The funny thing is that to get to Antwerpen, Belgium, the easiest way for me was to make it via Eindhoven, Netherlands. It is only a one hour drive with a car from Antwerpen, and Ryanair flies there.
The event takes place in Kinepolis.
As I came to the venue, I as a speaker I have received a very special gift:
My first impression was that Belgium is not so much to the north for this kind of hats. This looks more like Russian then Belgian! But after spending some time in Antwerp and I have realized that this was actually the best gift for this time of the year! It kept me dry and warm. So thank you very much!
And it’s we’re talking about hats, they were quite trendy at this conference!
By the way at the end of the day I had the chance to attend this speakers BOF by Hubert Sablonnière.
Hubert always hosts very useful discussions about how to speak and perform well at conferences. I have attended first such discussion in Morocco and I liked it a lot!
Day one ended in a very Belgian way:
Day two
Day two (or technically day four) was the day I gave both of my talks. But before that, I was honored to be interviewed by amazing Yolande Poirier About my talk “Java and the GPU”.
It was also a great pleasure to chat with wonderful Katharine Beaumont, with whom we’ve met many times through all of the year on different Voxxed/Devoxx events.
To tell you the truth I liked the venue! In many ways cinemas are great speakers’ perspective: Huge movie screen, plus very comfortable for attendees!
Is a disabled in a wheelchair was always easy for me to find a convenient place as an attendee.
From the organisers’ perspective I know that there are some issues with cinemas, but still it was ok!
Finally it was my turn to speak! The first session was a bit strange for me. It was not exactly technical, it was more social. It was named “Disabled > work > enabled”. I’m truly happy that the organisers gave a chance to me to make this quickie. In those 15 minutes I tried to share my experience, and how it helped me as a disabled to find my place in this industry. I’ve also try to convince companies to hire more remote workers thus equalizing the chances of disabled people to get a good job.
Video can be found here:
My second talk was “Java on GPU”.
But just before that, quite accidentally I was introduced to Brian Goetz himself by James Weaver. I was really happy! Its a pity I had to prepare for my talk and had to leave the conversation. My deepest respect for both of them!
I knew from the beginning that my talk about the GPU is not a hype talk. So I didn’t expect much people to come. Still I was quite happy that the hall was almost full!
(This is 15 minutes before the talk)
I must admit that I felt so nice as the demo worked. Since I was using the Amazon cloud, I wasn’t quite sure that the demo gods will support me, but it worked!
It was an amazing experience! I want to thank everybody who attended this session I sincerely hope you found something new for you! I had a lot of questions and discussions after the session. Although the scope of the technology is quite limited, if the task is suitable, some huge benefits can be achieved. I’ve tried to demonstrate this. And GPUs can be easily used in the Java world.
After getting done get I’ve got this wonderful feeling of relief! That was a good time to hang around!
And suddenly whom do I see! Josh!! My old buddy Josh Long! OMG!! I must admit he was one of the people who inspired me to try to speak at conferences.
It was a pleasure for me as a regular listener to be part of it this time.
Day three
Day three (or technically day five), was a short day. Unfortunately only half day was allocated for the final sessions of the event. So it was wonderful just to attend the talks. Still it was a tough choice – I wanted to attend all of the sessions! But it all ended up with the wonderful talks by Stuart Marks, Heinz Kabutz and Brian Goetz.
It was great! Definitely a must attend event!
After the conference…
As we had some time and our return flight was scheduled for the next day, we’ve decided to make a small ride to Gent. Absolutely lovely and very beautiful town!
The technical side
Ok, this was the “emotional” part of the event. Now some technical thoughts.
This Devoxx actually represented all of the modern trends in Java (and all around Java) world:
Java 9 and modularity;
Java Enterprise;
Spring and all around Spring;
Kotlin;
Machine learning and AI;
Some Devops/Containers/Clouds;
Microservices.
Hardcore stuff
As I’ve mentioned above, I’ve watched about ~180 videos of the talks I could not attend. So I’ve made my own short list of the talks I liked the most, including those I’ve seen there myself:
Once again!
It was a truly great experience and a lot of run! Special thanks for Stephen and the team for having me!
and special thanks to Ivan Ivanov, Vlado Pavlov and the Bulgarian guys/gals for the full time support!
And as member of The Gang of Five which stands behind the jPrime conference, I’ll try share the experience I’ve gained with the Bulgarian Java Community and inside my Company.
I’ll try to make some more posts.. if my talks are accepted elsewhere 🙂