I was at JavaOne 2026 in California last week. I participated onstage at the Community Keynote and also recorded some audio podcasts, which I’ll post over the next few months at Duke’s Corner. And since I’m on the team that produced the week-long event itself, I had many other duties to attend to throughout the conference as well. I’d say the Community Keynote took the most planning and implementation for me this year, where I hosted a short panel on the Java User Groups with some great JUG leaders. More on that in a later post, but here’s the live stream of the entire keynote that involved the entire team and community guests.

But one thing was missing from this event — I didn’t take a single photo! Usually, I take hundreds!

Instead, this year the Java Developer Relations team hired 3 photographers to shoot most of the event (except for the speaker dinner and the Day 0 events) plus a new feature for speaker headshots. And multiple team members showed up with cameras to shoot various bits as well. It felt weird to not have a camera glued to my face all day, to be honest. And I don’t know how I feel about it. On the one hand, shooting events has been a core part of my conference activities for a long time, but on the other hand it was nice to not have to lug around two big cameras and three lenses for 10 hours a day for 4 days straight and then have to edit hundreds of images afterwards. For example, last year I shot JavaOne 2025 all alone (including the speaker dinner and the Day 0 events), which was a challenge for sure. I didn’t shoot headshots because that does actually require another person and specific gear so we didn’t offer that service last year.

But the 600 images I did shoot took a few weeks to edit and publish. It was an enormous amount of work for one person that usually gets done via a small team of photographers and editors. But, hey, those images generated more than 75,000 views on Flickr so that’s cool. Now, it turned out that no one cared about that massive metric, but it’s surely meaningful to me. And the images are valuable to the Java developers who got them on Flickr via a Creative Commons license so they could be used elsewhere freely. That’s why I shot so many events over the years — to contribute the content to the developer community. Open Source conferences should generate Open Source content, right? It’s interesting that not everyone in the FOSS community agrees with that statement.

But this year? Nothing. I have no JavaOne 2026 photos to contribute. That was the plan, but I’ll have to digest that decision for a bit.

Anyway, here’s something I noticed by NOT shooting images this year. I gave myself time to breathe! Developer conferences are challenging to manage under the best of circumstances. You can easily grind yourself into dust in no time flat working 12 hour days on site following months of planning. I didn’t do that this year. In fact, I intentionally didn’t even attend all of the events throughout the week but instead chose to go back to my room at times to rest. I could have spent the extra time recording dozens of podcasts but I didn’t do that either. Instead, I recorded 6, which is a perfectly reasonable number. I did, however, talk to as many developers as I could find. Just hallway conversations. And that was a new exercise for me because in the past I used the camera to engage people. This year, it was just me. And I really loved it. I got to know many more people this way since I was more present in every moment. I was there to talk to you, not shoot your photo. The whole thing felt different.

So, it was a good event generally. I may implement this system in the future and just leave the photography behind at this point. I’ve shot about 100,000 images at events since 2000 so maybe that’s enough. Maybe it’s time to move on.