One of the underrated parts of conferences is what happens after they “end”.
Not the Hallway Track. The Airport Track.
You sit at the gate, a bit tired, waiting for your flight. And suddenly you’re in one of the best conversations of the whole week.
At
#JavaOne, that’s exactly great chat with Michal Niczyporuk. We ended up talking about travel and our shared love for airplanes while watching traffic at SFO. He showed me this flight tracker, which is honestly next level:
globe.adsbexchange.com
Later, we ran into 👓 Anton Arhipov.
We got into stories about license servers, how people tried to hack them, and what it took to protect Java applications. It quickly went deep. Bytecode. Classloaders. The kind of stuff you only really understand after working on real systems for years.
It reminded me a lot of challenges we had 15 years ago. Different context, same core problems.
That’s the thing with these conversations. They are real. People sharing what actually worked and what didn’t.
Time flies. (pun intended)
If you want to be part of the Airport Track:
Wear Java stuff. T-shirt, hoodie, badge on your backpack. It makes starting a conversation easy.
And if you enjoy these kinds of conversations, you’ll probably like the Hallway Track at JCON EUROPE:
2026.europe.jcon.one/hallway-trackh