Last Friday we had our first camunda BPM community day! It was really awesome! Thanks everybody who joined. I am really impressed that we could organize that so close after the 7.0 release and so many people already traveled to Prague just for us. I can just repeat myself: AWESOME!
Today I want to share some impressions and slides with you – we recorded the sessions and hope we will get videos online soon as well.
Introduction & Vision
After welcoming everybody Daniel talked about camunda BPM and the technical vision, which is about to empower developers to build awesome BPM applications. He briefly discussed the improved performance in 7.0 and I saw a lot of people nodding when Daniel talked about HUGE history data when running big scenarios and got good feedback about the solution strategies he sketched. He also explained why it is essential to be an Open Source framework for our vision.
Latest and greatest from the dev team
Afterwards Nico talked about the latest news from the development team. He focused on the user interface with Camunda Tasklist, cockpit, camunda-bpmn.js and last but not least the plugin-infrastructure. Yeah – you see right – he developed a Macgyver Plugin for cockpit. That is really awesome 🙂
Customer experience report: 1&1 Internet AG
A highlight of the day was the talk from Mehmet Sürü from 1&1, a leading telecommunication provider at least in Germany. And hey – they already have modeled over 5.500 processes in BPMN – wow! He explained their learning curve, leading from SOA to BPM (because in processes not services lie the real value) and technologically speaking from a platform composed of JBoss AS 4 + jBPM 3 to JBoss AS 7 + camunda BPM 7. He also talked about why Open Source, Community and Contributions are vital for their core “Service + Process Platform”. And camunda BPM is already in production for a couple of processes at 1&1 – great to hear!
Tales from Consulting
Falko and me talked about some experiences from our consulting work at various customers using BPMN 2.0 and camunda BPM. We talked about the online working group best practices (see our next meeting), some results we already got, versioning of processes and process applications, Liferay Portal Integration, asynchronous continuation, heterogeneous cluster support and the power of it, JMS usage, Business-IT-Alignment, Handling of Incidents and own cockpit Plugins and some small but really helpful stuff in real life – like the task name beautifier. Hope not too much content in too short time.
Contributors
We already have a quite active ecosystem of contributors. Two contributions were highlighted in Prague:
Martin Schimak (Plexiti): Martin kicked-off and worked on camunda-bpm-testing (together with a couple of people in the meanwhile). We showed us the variety of topics already covered: fluent API, behavior driven development, mocking, …
(and he blogged about the community day as well)
As second contribution Rafael Cordones wanted to present camunda-bpm-camel, the integration with Apache Camel. As he had to cancel the visit in short notice I quickly introduced that. Cool to have a couple of people in the audience already using Camel!
How do we work, Roadmap and Feedback
The rest of the afternoon was packed with some demonstrations about how we work (JIRA, Kanban-Board, GitHub, Pull-Requests, Contributions-Guidelines, Forum and so on). We discussed the current roadmap and plans – and we got pretty good feedback from the community – that further confirmed that we are on the right track. And the most amazing thing: There were no issues raised which is urgent or problematic – so camunda BPM 7.0 was definitely a step in the right direction. That was the right time to start partying (see below) 🙂
Which city to go next time?
The venue this year was fantastic. Prague is a wonderful city really worth visiting. The Hotel was really nice, food was plenty available (no lie that they had “unlimited supply”) and even the weather was perfect!
Hard to beat next year – but we can try. If you have a recommendation for a city, which is: easy to reach from different European cities, not too expensive and nice: Let us know!
Some more impressions
Pork me on GitHub?
Last but not least we had a really – really good idea (imagine that we liked it somewhere around midnight ;-)). As most of the people ate some fresh grilled pork in the evening we came up the new badge idea: pork me on GitHub. Actually no idea what it means – but maybe better not to think about it:
But as vegetarian I have to add that Prague offered a good choice of vegetarian and vegan restaurants – so I could try a vegetarian and a vegan goulash. And both were really perfect! This is how the future must look like 🙂