I guess I'm the bravest one and the first blog post will be mine.

In this blog we'll try to tell our story. Our - the people behind the conference.

So the introduction:

Who are we?

It's five of us - Ivan, Mitya, Nayden, Martin and Mihail (that's me). We're part of the Bulgarian Java User Group (bgjug, jug.bg, java-bg.org). Some of us are on the pictures on the front page of jprime.io.

In the last couple of years we've been involved in Adopt OpenJDK(fixing jaxp bugs, , we've written some code (primitives in generics), we go to conferences around the world (javaone trip), we do hackatons (valhalla hackaton), we write tutorials (building openjdk on osx/linux).

Although our day jobs are quite different, all of us are somehow involved with popularizing the Java idea.

The conference

We decided to organize a conference. Far larger than the hackatons we do. We wanted it to be

- "wow, this guy is coming to the conference? I will ask my boss to buy me a ticket". We want the presenters to be the best. No marketing lectures allowed.

- shiny (awesome venue with a perfect organisation). Since we're doing this for the first time - it might not go perfect, but we'll do our best, our motivation is unmatched. Some of us have been dreaming about this moment for many years.

- accessible - We're not making any money out of it. We're doing it because we like the idea. It's not free, because we have expenses we have to cover. Also we want attendees to commit.

--Mihail