Introducing Rabea Gransberger

Rabea Gransberger is a software engineer and co-leads the software development department at MEKOS. She is also a well-known speaker at Java conferences and user groups around the world. Rabea is a Java Champion and started the Bremen Java User Group in 2012. She doesn't necessarily see herself as a developer advocate, rather her main focus is on keeping the code base clean and educating her team, and developers around the world, to write better code. Find Rabea on Twitter: @rgransberger.

Geertjan Wielenga: Can you explain who you are and what you do?

Rabea Gransberger: I'm from Germany and I work in Bremen as a software developer, department lead, and project manager. So, it's a bit of everything.

In my team, we mainly get our tasks from our customers and we are in the nice position of having two major customers that allow us to work in an agile way. They give us some tasks, we prioritize the tasks together, and then we can pick the tasks that have high priority, along with some smaller ones, which are good for filling up the sprint.

We have a team of five developers and I'm responsible for architectural design and educating the team, as well as completing tasks from the sprint. I'm trying to educate the team by doing code reviews and hands-on labs. For example, when Java 8 came out, we had internal training sessions where we solved some streams and lambda exercises to get some practical experience with the new APIs.

Geertjan Wielenga: At conferences, you often talked about code reviews. What started that?

Rabea's ideas for talks

Rabea Gransberger: The idea to give a talk about code reviews was inspired by my daily work. Sometimes, I also get ideas for topics when I'm attending conferences.

For example, one of my talks was called "Effective IDE Usage." I've seen many people at conferences struggling to get the code to work correctly during their talks because they didn't use any of the content assist in the integrated development environment (IDE), so that is how I got the idea there.

When I did the functional libraries talk for Java 8, I just submitted the idea for the talk because I was interested in the topic myself. I wanted to find out if there were any nice libraries out there that my team could use in our company. When the talk was accepted, I was already doing all the preparational stuff and investigating the libraries.

Geertjan Wielenga: What were the main points in your talk about code reviews?

Rabea Gransberger: I made the point that every company should start doing code reviews. It's okay if you just start when you feel the need to do a code review. For example, if you have a change in a very critical component, you might think that somebody else should do a code review.

If you start like that, I think you get better results. Some companies say, "Every piece of code that we're writing has to have a review." I think people are driven away by the additional effort.

Geertjan Wielenga: What does a code review consist of?

Rabea Gransberger: A code review, for me, is just a very informal review: having a look at the code and writing down comments, and giving them back to the author of the code so he or she can improve the code.

Geertjan Wielenga: What kind of person should be the one doing the review?

Rabea Gransberger: The person doing the review should also be a person who has plenty of knowledge in the domain. So, for an optimal result from the code review, they should be part of the same team because this also gives the benefit that more than one person in the team knows the code. If some issues come up later, then there will be more than one person who can fix the code.

Geertjan Wielenga: What led you to go down this career path?

Rabea Gransberger: When I was still at university, I registered for a German forum where people would ask questions. It was just a general IT forum. I tried to answer the Java questions myself, even the things that I didn't understand at first. I usually tried to create a little test for myself and read up on things to see if I could actually solve the problem.

Then, in 2004, I got my first job as a Java developer when I was still a student. So, this was also how I got better at programming Java. After one year, somebody on the job told me that there's a debugger.

Nobody at university would ever tell you that there's a debugger! I was always fiddling around with System.out.println statements and my colleague asked, "Why are you using those? Just use the debugger." For me, it was kind of embarrassing. I was also angry that nobody at university ever told me about the debugger!

Geertjan Wielenga: How did you build on these experiences?

Rabea Gransberger: When I started at my current company in 2009, I had to learn a lot because the mineral oil/petrol station business domain, which is the focus of our work, is very specialized.

After two years, I was bored. There was nobody left to teach me anything about programming. I always wanted to become better at Java programming, so I was looking for other ideas.

I was reading The Java Specialists' Newsletter from Heinz Kabutz at the time and he had a special offer for participants of his regular online courses to attend his masterclass on the island of Crete. So, I flew there and did this four-day course. I was a junior Java developer at that time and the course was very challenging. I couldn't solve all of the exercises, but, apparently, I was good enough that Heinz kept in touch with me!

Attending conferences

Geertjan Wielenga: Was your introduction to traveling to conferences via Heinz's JCrete unconference?

Rabea Gransberger: Yes, in 2011 I was invited by Heinz and did travel to the first JCrete unconference.

There I got in touch with other developers who traveled to conferences. They were always asking, "Why don't you go to conferences as well and give a talk?"

I would reply, "But I don't have any ideas for talks because what I do at work is in a very specialized domain."

I didn't think that a talk that I gave would be interesting for the outside world. When you completely understand what you're doing, you feel that it's very boring and nobody else could possibly be interested.

My first talk was at EclipseCon Europe in 2012, which I did with a coworker of mine. That came about because we attended one of the Eclipse demo camps that are held when some new Eclipse version is released.

One evening, we were traveling to Hamburg to the demo camp and we were talking outside in a smoking area. There was another guy there and he was asking what we did for work. We said, "We're developing products based on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform and we're using the Eclipse Remote Application Platform to have the same code base for the desktop application and the web application. We're also investigating how to use Tabris."

At the time, Tabris was a platform that was bringing the same code base from the desktop to mobile devices, so it had a special way of "converting" the code to Android or iOS.

The stranger said, "That's very interesting because there's a lot of theory about using a single code base for having those three different user interfaces, but not many people are actually doing that. Would you be interested in giving a talk at EclipseCon Europe?"

"We realized that nobody was doing what we were doing, so we gave our first talk."

—Rabea Gransberger

That guy was Ralph Mueller, who was one of the chairpersons for the EclipseCon conferences at that time. We realized that nobody was doing what we were doing, so we gave our first talk.

That year, I started the Java User Group in Bremen. I had been looking for a Java User Group in Bremen for some time. I would go searching for it every couple of years, but there was no such group. So, I finally decided to create my own. It does still exist. I'm not the lead anymore because so much time goes into organizing that kind of stuff. Now we have an organization team with three other people involved.

Geertjan Wielenga: That's the best thing! The next phase is to hand it on to somebody else. Isn't that the perfect cycle?

Running a user group

Rabea Gransberger: Yes! It's also great because I'm not good at motivating people. I'm good at teaching people who are already motivated, but I'm not good at motivating people.

We initially had very low attendance at the Java User Group, but I think that was more due to the platform that we chose. In the beginning, we chose to create all the notifications for the meetings on the German XING platform, which is like the LinkedIn platform, and XING is just not good at sending out a meeting invitation.

You only get an email that you have a new message. Then you have to log in to actually be able to read it. I, myself, would never read a message sent via XING, unless the topic was very interesting.

We had 200 people who were registered to that group, but only five people were showing up for the meetings. Due to the low attendance, it was hard to convince speakers to come to Bremen. Peter Neubauer, a founder of Neo4j, for example, came down from Sweden and there were only around six or seven people attending. I felt very sorry for him because of the long travel, but I was very grateful he came and I was able to show him the city. I would always warn the speakers, saying, "Don't expect more than 10 people to come!"

After a while, it didn't feel right to me anymore to ask people to drive such a long way for just a small group of people. So, when I was reading emails from Simon Maple, who was organizing the Virtual Java User Group at the time, I was thinking, "Oh, he's so good at motivating people and I'm just not good at it."

I decided that somebody else would do a better job and I gave the position of the Java User Group lead to somebody else. We also changed the platform to Meetup, which is very good at reminding people about meetings and informing new local users with an interest in Java about the group. Now we have around 50 people attending the meetings, which is much better.

Geertjan Wielenga: How did you start speaking at conferences on a regular basis?

Rabea Gransberger: I was at Devoxx and I got to know some people. They told me about the inaugural Devoxx UK conference, so I submitted a talk and that worked out. In 2013, I gave my first conference talk alone in London.

"It was a whole different world to see normal developers giving talks at conferences."

—Rabea Gransberger

What is very interesting is that before I went to the Java masterclass in Crete, I didn't even know that there were conferences about Java! So, for me, it was a whole different world to see normal developers giving talks at conferences and I really liked that because the people were very friendly. You would meet some other passionate people, you could talk about what you were doing, and you could learn from others. I stayed with the conference scene after that.

Geertjan Wielenga: One of the last times that I saw you, you were actually helping to run JCrete. Are you still doing that?

Rabea Gransberger: Yes, I'm in the "unorganizers" team for JCrete! I've been doing that since 2014. I mainly help with the event and with the setting up, and I make sure that everything runs smoothly when I'm there.

I was also part of the JavaLand program committee for three years, but I'm not doing that anymore because I just don't have the time for it.

Geertjan Wielenga: Do you also write articles or books, or anything like that?

Rabea Gransberger: I did write one article for the German iX Developer magazine, which was published last year. The article was about Java 9 modules and I did answer some interview questions for another German online magazine.

I don't do that much because writing articles just takes time. Currently, I don't feel that I need to write any articles. I also started my own blog, but the only blog post was about creating the blog!

Geertjan Wielenga: Since you're doing all of these different activities, how do you find the time to be involved in the community?

Rabea Gransberger: Currently, it's hard for me. When I was younger, until I was probably 30, I would enjoy writing some code in the evenings after I got home from work. I would sit at home and read something about Java or do some coding, and so on. But for the past few years, I haven't found the time anymore to do that. Now I need time to relax in the evenings!

Sometimes, when I have a longer vacation, I feel like I need to write some code. I'm also doing some open-source work, like helping to solve some of the Eclipse bugs.

With conferences, it's usually one week before I have to give a talk, then it turns up on my calendar and I think, "Oh, I should probably start creating the talk or rehearsing an older talk again." It consumes so much time. It takes one whole weekend until I have the basic structure and slides for a talk if it's a 45-minute talk.

Geertjan Wielenga: When do you decide that you've had enough of a talk and you want to do something new?

Knowing when to retire a talk

Rabea Gransberger: It's just a feeling for me. Usually, I've been submitting a talk for around two years, then, at some point, I just stop because I don't want to hear it again myself or the topic is out of date.

Eventually, the "Java 9 Modules" talk will be out of date, when everybody knows how to create Java modules, and then I will have to stop it. But with the code reviews talk, for example, it's funny because I think that it was in a very good state when I gave it for the last time. It was a very good feeling. Before that, I always had the feeling that I didn't like the talk myself. I got very good feedback about the talk from the conference rating systems and so on, so I continued to give the talk, but I was never really satisfied with the talk myself.

Geertjan Wielenga: If you were to describe yourself at a party, what would you say that you do?

Rabea Gransberger: That's really difficult. Probably, nowadays, I would say that I'm a software developer and consultant because at my company, it's mostly consulting work that we do for our customers.

Half a year ago, I would have told people that I was just a software developer, but when I got to work with other companies on customer projects, I found out that what we do is mostly consultancy work. Usually, a software developer just gets a task and solves it, but they aren't thinking about processes and trying to extract tasks from the processes that the customer needs.

Geertjan Wielenga: You're not a developer advocate who goes to a conference to talk about a particular product. You're not representing your company: you're representing yourself. Is that correct?

Rabea Gransberger: Yes, at my company we don't have a project that is open source and we don't have a product that can be used by other developers as well. I'm not in the position to advocate for a framework or product, but I do mention parts of my work during my talks.

When I gave the "Java 9 Modules" talk, I was also referring to Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi), for example, which I use in my daily work. There were several times when a developer advocate position was offered to me by other companies, but I don't think that's what I would like to do, actually.

Geertjan Wielenga: Interesting. Will this be a developer advocate book with somebody saying that they don't want to be a developer advocate?!

Freedom at work

Rabea Gransberger: Yes! I have the same feelings about other software development positions, as well, because in my current position, I can just do what I like and also decide on the future for my team.

"If I took that kind of job, the company would send me to conferences and I wouldn't have the freedom to decide to go to a conference."

—Rabea Gransberger

With many other positions out there at well-known companies, which regularly sponsor conferences, there will always be a booth at a conference and those people will have to do some booth duty. I wouldn't want to do that. If I took that kind of job, the company would send me to conferences and I wouldn't have the freedom to decide to go to a conference. It's actually my decision now.

When I talk to other developers at a conference, many of them say that they were sent there and they don't really enjoy what they're doing. They could be developer advocates or just developers who go to conferences and have to do some booth duty.

Geertjan Wielenga: Are there any other reasons for avoiding "advocacy" work?

Rabea Gransberger: Yes, I also enjoy working with customers, by which I mean not only software developers as customers but people outside of IT. I enjoy translating what they are saying into development tasks and trying to optimize their processes, and also learning about their domain.

Customers call us and ask, "How can we solve this topic with your software product?" Sometimes, it's a very domain-specific question. It's mainly asking, "How can I optimize this process that is part of my daily work?"

In my job, I'm in a position where I have learned enough about the role that the customer is working in that I can actually help them. That is what I enjoy the most. I wouldn't like it if people took away that freedom from me. I want to make my own choice about what I'm doing.

For example, today is a home office day, which I enjoy. I can usually choose whether I want to work from home or from the office. I normally go to the office because I just like to see my coworkers.

Geertjan Wielenga: Since you don't work for a company that sends you somewhere, does your company pay you to go to these places?

Rabea Gransberger: Yes, now my company does pay parts of my travel. In the beginning, I was taking vacation to go to conferences. I paid for the flights, I paid for the conferences, and I paid for the hotels. I paid for everything.

Geertjan Wielenga: Why? What motivated you in this scene in the first place?

Rabea Gransberger: It probably was about reaching a goal because I need goals in my life. I get all my motivation from having a goal that I can actually reach.

Geertjan Wielenga: What was the goal?

Rabea Gransberger: My goal was becoming a Java Champion, which I became last year. I'm always calling Java Champions "Java Marketing Champions." Many people think that a Java Champion is a very good Java developer, but it's not about being a good Java developer. It's about developer advocates who are going out there and advocating for Java as a great language, and selling Java without getting paid for it.

I wasn't too interested in becoming a Java Champion in that way, but still, it sounded appealing.

I wanted to become a well-known speaker and to be invited to conferences in the first place. Last year, I was very happy when people started to invite me to conferences, pay for my travel, or pay for hotels, because it was a recognition of the hours and hours that I put into preparing my talks.

Geertjan Wielenga: Do you mean that even without sending in an abstract, these conferences contacted you and asked, "Do you want to come and speak?"

Rabea Gransberger: Yes! I think it's easier for me, though, because I'm a woman and people are always looking for women speakers at conferences. If you're not really bad at giving talks as a woman, then I think you're invited to conferences at some point. You have to fail a lot before you're not invited back to a conference.

I'm actually constantly trying to improve my talks. People have very different opinions about what a good talk at a conference should look like. Many people are now saying that a talk should be without slides and mainly free, with just notes.

"It just has to be a well-delivered talk."

—Rabea Gransberger

Two years ago, I was sitting at a conference thinking, "Okay, what are the reasons that I like a talk myself? Is it because it's given freely or are there some other factors?" I decided that it just has to be a well-delivered talk. People can give a talk with slides. Some people just hold onto the desk and don't walk around on stage. I found that these aspects don't really matter to me.

Geertjan Wielenga: What is a well-delivered talk to you? What does that mean?

The qualities of a good talk

Rabea Gransberger: It means that the speaker is very knowledgeable and that he or she has a well-prepared talk, and they don't skip some of the answers that I would actually expect to have given to me.

A great talk should also match the abstract. Plenty of speakers give talks that don't match their abstract at all because they don't read it again. They submit something for a conference, half a year before the conference, and when they prepare the talk, they have a different idea for the talk in their mind because it developed over that half year.

If a talk doesn't match the abstract anymore, then it's not good for the audience. The audience is at the talk because they expect something that they read in the abstract. Sometimes, some of the points that were raised in the abstract are not addressed in the talk.

What I had to work on, after giving my first talk, was that I was very nervous at the beginning. When I'm very nervous, I tend to talk too fast. When I talk too fast, I can't breathe anymore. So, at some points, I had to struggle between talking and actually breathing.

I think that now I'm more relaxed. For example, last autumn I had five talks in six weeks and it was always the same talk. At the end of that period, I wasn't nervous anymore because I had been giving the talk all the time and it was very easy for me. It's a nice experience to be very fluent in giving one of your talks.

It feels great to not be nervous anymore, walk freely on the stage, and describe some of the aspects of the talk.

I'm trying to improve. I know that I will never be like Venkat Subramaniam, for example, but that also comes with experience. I will never, ever, give as many talks as Venkat! If you give a talk every couple of days, then you have a very different experience level compared to other people.

Geertjan Wielenga: Is it purely a question of speaking frequently, would you say?

Rabea Gransberger: No, it's also that you have to be willing to improve yourself. What I still can't do is actually watch my own talks. I just can't do that. It's still embarrassing to see myself giving a talk. But I try to learn from the feedback that I get from other people.

Another reason that I give talks is that they have helped in growing my self-confidence. I used to be a very shy person, so before I started going to conferences, I could never have imagined myself traveling the world alone and going to different places.

I used to travel with my parents as a kid, so traveling was nothing new for me. I knew how to get around and I knew airports, and how everything works, so that was a big advantage for me. But I could never have imagined actually going out myself, into a city that I didn't know before, and getting some dinner alone.

That was a big barrier in the beginning, but now I think my confidence has improved a lot. I'm not that shy anymore. I think just going on stage is a good thing for shy people.

Now it's normal for me at conferences, when I see nobody that I know for lunch, for example, to ask people if I can share the table with them, and just talk to them. It's a very big step forward from a personal perspective!

"I don't have a problem with sharing my personal mistakes on stage."

—Rabea Gransberger

Sometimes, during my talks, I also refer to personal mistakes as well. I don't have a problem with sharing my personal mistakes on stage because I think people have to learn from that. Many people still see conference speakers as better developers who are at a level that they will probably never reach. I try to give them a different view about that. I just say that I have made my own mistakes as well and that I'm not perfect.

Geertjan Wielenga: Have you been in situations where you've known that the people in the room, or you suspect that the people in the room, know more than you do about the topic that you're talking about? How do you deal with that?

Receiving feedback on your talk

Rabea Gransberger: Did I ever have somebody attending one of my talks who made me feel uncomfortable? I don't think so, but I like to hear some criticism about my talks as well, so that would be fine for me.

What I think is sad is that you usually only get the good feedback about your talks and you rarely hear why people didn't like your talks.

For me, it was very nice when Heinz was sitting in one of my "Effective IDE Usage" talks because I learned many of the things that I was showing from him.

With the "Java 9 Modules" talks that I was doing, I don't think anybody was there from Oracle, but I did talk to one of the guys from Oracle at Devoxx in Antwerp, and he said that he liked my talk from a recording he had seen.

I had this one moment when a talk was rejected and I actually got feedback about why. It wasn't useful because the feedback was just questions. The organizers had questions but because they couldn't contact me and ask those questions, they rejected the talk. I would have felt better had I just had a simple rejection, without any explanation, in that case. That's something that I have to work on myself. I always like it when I get some critical feedback, but it's also hard to actually read it.

Geertjan Wielenga: If you're at a conference and you're doing a talk, and someone asks a question that you don't know the answer to, how do you deal with that?

Rabea Gransberger: I'll say that I don't know the answer, or I'll ask the audience if they know the answer. This has worked out well, even in a big room.

I was giving a talk in Stuttgart and I had a very big room with 500 people attending. I offered back the question, which was related to code reviews, to the audience. At that conference, they had people walking around with a microphone, so it was possible for somebody else to answer the question.

For me, it's completely fine if speakers say, "Come to me afterward and we'll talk about it," in cases when the answer is longer or the question is too specific for the whole audience.

There was a very funny aspect about my code reviews talk because most of the questions that I got after giving the talk were about teams that didn't talk to each other. They did code reviews, but they only talked through the comments of the code reviews and they didn't talk to each other. The team would try to solve social problems during the code reviews, which wouldn't work. So, the main answer was to just talk to each other in person.

Geertjan Wielenga: Let's discuss technical glitches: when you're at a conference, it often happens, right?

Dealing with technical glitches

Rabea Gransberger: Once, I was at a conference and I was on the stage preparing to give a talk, but after the previous talk, some of the pins of the VGA adapter were not straight anymore. I couldn't fit them into my port and so there was a technician coming, and so on. It was probably only one minute before my talk that we actually got this fixed.

This incident didn't make me nervous: it actually made me more relaxed because I had something to focus on. I had to focus on the technical problem and not focus on being nervous about my talk and what to say. So, for me, it was a good experience because after that, I became much more relaxed before my talks.

Geertjan Wielenga: Have you ever had an experience at a conference that really did make you nervous?

Rabea Gransberger: The only experience I had where I was really anxious was at Devoxx Morocco.

I had a new laptop and I didn't know if my adapter would work because there were some scary stories online about the adapter that I had to use.

When I did the setup before my talk, I couldn't get a connection to the projector. I was worried because I wanted to do some live coding and I also needed my slides. At some point, one guy from the audience pointed out that the other end of the cable wasn't connected to the projector. I was very happy that he did because I didn't check that!

At a conference last year, they had many technical issues because they were using very long cables and half of the signal would be lost before it reached the projector. I was doing some live coding, which was an integral part of the talk, and whenever I moved the mouse, you would only see black-and-green lines on the projected screen. So, it didn't work at all.

In the end, I had to point people to a video recording of the talk, so they could actually watch that at home. That was kind of sad, but I think nobody was really angry because they did know that it wasn't my fault and there were many technical problems throughout the conference.

Geertjan Wielenga: Is burnout something that you have experienced?

Rabea Gransberger: Usually, when I'm coding, I forget about time. I tend to work too much. I think the most I did was two weeks in a row with more than 80 hours per week. After that, I was really exhausted.

"Whenever I get some of the symptoms that show that I'm very overworked, I try to have a day to actually relax."

—Rabea Gransberger

Now I know the symptoms that I have when I work too much and I usually try to monitor them. Whenever I get some of the symptoms that show that I'm very overworked, I try to have a day to actually relax and not do that much work. There's no point in working so much because you will get slower and slower in actually getting your work done.

Geertjan Wielenga: What are some of the symptoms of burnout?

Rabea Gransberger: For me, when I work too much, I struggle to find my words and when I speak, it sounds terrible.

I find that I'm not able to remember things that easily, which I'm usually very good at. For example, I forget my lunch and leave it at home in the fridge. Then, I'm sitting in the office and don't have my lunch. Sometimes, I try to make some coffee in the office and forget to turn on the coffee machine, or I just brew some hot water because I forget to put in the coffee powder. All kinds of funny things happen!

I know how to monitor myself now, but three years ago, it was really bad. I had one day where I couldn't get up.

I was only staying at home and I couldn't get up because I was just so exhausted that my body refused to work. I made an appointment with a traditional healer and he found out that every muscle in my whole body was so tense that he couldn't do any of the tests he was trying to do.

The healer showed me some exercises to shake off the stress in the evening. Actually, you should do it three times a day. If you watch a dog, for example, after a dog has experienced a stressful situation, it shakes because it releases the tension of its muscles. Humans have forgotten how to do this. Shaking out stress used to be in our genes, but it became socially unacceptable and this is why we don't do it anymore. So, shake like a dog! It looks funny but it helps, so I'm trying to do that.

This is also one of the reasons that I'm not coding in the evenings anymore when I come home. I just need to take the time to recharge overnight to be able to work the next day.

Geertjan Wielenga: If you go to a conference and you attend a number of sessions, how much do you learn from that?

Knowledge gained from conferences

Rabea Gransberger: In the beginning, I learned a lot about core Java and about performance in Java. Learning about the future of Java helped me because I knew more than other people and could pass this knowledge on to them in conversations.

The main thing is just the broad knowledge that you get at conferences. You get a very early look at some new tools that are coming out, like Testcontainers, for example.

I did hear about that a year ago at the GeekOUT conference and now it's gaining an even bigger audience. So, I think it's good to be one of the first people to know about a certain tech.

I invest a great deal of time in researching a topic for my talks. It's not always that I know everything about the topic myself. For example, with code reviews, I had my own impression of them. I also read papers about code reviews to actually create the talk and to get some more knowledge.

I put articles that I find on my reading list. When I go to conferences, I try to catch up with where software development is heading. I try to get these ideas back into my company as well.

I usually read Twitter, where I get plenty of ideas. You get people tweeting new and cool stuff from conferences, even if you're not at the conferences. Almost all the people I know from conferences are on Twitter. If you're following those people on social media, then you get something out of that as well. I've been to too many unconferences that got me into bad habits. So, nowadays, I tend to hop between talks, even at normal conferences.

Geertjan Wielenga: Can you talk more about unconferences?

Rabea Gransberger: The official name of an unconference is an Open Space Technology conference and it's a conference with no fixed schedule at the beginning. You just go there, then everybody is asked to propose a topic.

You try to cluster similar topics and put them into a preliminary schedule.

The interesting thing is, you don't have to have any prior knowledge of the topic. At the unconferences I've attended, I mostly just went to discussions where everybody could have a say. I think this is a more intense learning experience for me. I tend to learn more at unconferences than I do at conferences.

Geertjan Wielenga: What are some things that you've learned, maybe over the past year, that you didn't know before?

Rabea Gransberger: There's a reason that I'm always taking pictures at conferences and that I like to take pictures with my phone: sometimes the year moves by so fast that I enjoy browsing through the pictures. I like to review the year and see what I've done throughout it.

"I learned to actually enjoy talking to people who have a different opinion."

—Rabea Gransberger

I think one special thing that I learned at conferences is to enjoy talking to people, even if they have very different ideas on the topics. Usually, when you're in your personal environment, you try to find people who have a similar opinion and you become friends. But at conferences, it's somehow different. I learned to actually enjoy talking to people who have a different opinion, which broadens my point of view as well.

What I also like about conferences is learning from people who come from different parts of the world. I always had this feeling that there's a certain truth about some aspects of the world.

I thought that everybody has to have the same feeling that something is right or that something is wrong, but it's just not the case. Everybody's so influenced by how they grew up that they have a very different view on what is right and what is wrong. I think that's something I really enjoy about conferences: hearing about how other people are living in their own countries and their own cultures.

Rabea's view of developer advocates

Geertjan Wielenga: As you don't have "developer advocate" on your business card, when you go to conferences, how do you view the developer advocates? Do you see a difference between the way that official developer advocates present their content versus people who are not official?

Rabea Gransberger: I'm not sure that I would actually notice the difference if I didn't know that they were official developer advocates. It's pretty much the same.

It might only be different for people who go into new roles. I never feel that the developer advocates are presenting their material like some of the speakers of sponsored talks. They always try to sell their product, but developer advocates don't do that too much.

Geertjan Wielenga: Could you explain a little bit about sponsored talks at conferences to draw out that distinction?

Rabea Gransberger: I usually never go to sponsored talks because I think much of it is just marketing. Many of the speakers are not honestly presenting the product: they have a lot of marketing stuff in their slides.

The speakers present things that probably do not even work today, but they might work in the future. I think people get disappointed if they go to the sponsored talks and then go and try out the materials, and find that they don't work as expected. The speakers don't honestly answer any questions from the audience either. I don't like that.

Geertjan Wielenga: Let's go back to you saying that developer advocates working for companies are hard to distinguish from speakers who are not working as official developer advocates. What's the reason for that?

Rabea Gransberger: No, that's not what I'm saying; I'm saying that I don't see a difference in the way that they present the talks. I'm sure that there's a difference in what they do for daily work, but I don't see a difference in how they present talks in comparison to other speakers who are not in the developer advocate role.

I think that they are very passionate in delivering what their job allows them to deliver. One of the differences between sponsored talks and developer advocate talks is that many sponsored speakers don't seem to be people who are very passionate about the topic.

Geertjan Wielenga: Since you're not a developer advocate, how do you see your career developing from here?

Rabea Gransberger: I'm not sure what my career will look like in the future because when I was still in university, I would always have some goals to work toward and achieve.

My goals for the future are not particularly related to work or my career anymore. I'm pretty happy with my role now. I don't want to go down the management career path, like other people have. I'm already partly in management, but I don't want to go into full-time management. I want to do some more open source to actually be able to learn from others through the code reviews.

Geertjan Wielenga: Are there people in your team who you talk to about going to conferences? Do you mention that this is something that they could add to their working life?

Encouraging more people to attend conferences

Rabea Gransberger: Yes, I do. There's a small local conference called the Java Forum Nord in Hanover, which is just one hour away by train. I always ask coworkers if they want to go there because it's a good conference for people who haven't been to a conference before.

"Some people are intimidated by the atmosphere at conferences."

—Rabea Gransberger

Many people don't like the idea of going to conferences. It's just a different way of learning and I think everybody's very different in how they learn. Some people are intimidated by the atmosphere at conferences.

If you're going alone, for example, and you don't have anybody to talk with, I think it can be very overwhelming to see all those people running in different directions. Then at lunchtime, you're standing there alone. So, I think conferences aren't a good way for everybody to learn.

Geertjan Wielenga: What are some topics that you're currently beginning to explore?

Rabea Gransberger: I think that security-related topics are very important nowadays and I'm still busy implementing some stuff related to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in our applications. This is probably the main topic right now that I have to read up on. It's a huge amount of effort to actually implement, but I still think it's a good idea to give people back the power over the data that they're sharing.

Geertjan Wielenga: What does it mean to implement that in an application?

Rabea Gransberger: If you have a product and you're storing personal-related data, you have to have a report that says, "Okay, this is the personal-related data that we store about you."

You also have to say if you're sharing the data with any other companies. If the person wants their data to be deleted, you have to comply with that. In some parts of our application, we have to change the data structures we use to store the data in to be able to create reports more easily.

Geertjan Wielenga: When was the last time that you bought a tech book?

Rabea Gransberger: The last time I bought a tech book was last year. I bought the book from Paul Bakker and Sander Mak: Java 9 Modularity. But I don't buy that many books.

For me, I don't think it makes any sense to have a very deep knowledge, which I get from books, about things that I'm probably not going to use in the near future. I only read books about things that I'm trying to use as I'm starting to use them or if I want to learn more about the things I enjoyed using previously. Other than that, it's important for me to have a broad basic knowledge to be able to choose the areas I want to learn about in more detail.

Geertjan Wielenga: What would the younger version of yourself think about what you do now?

Rabea Gransberger: I would never have thought that I would be leading a team because I've always had problems talking to people. I'm proud of what I'm doing today and what I've achieved over the last few years. I've not only learned about software development, but also how to deal with people and how to talk with people. I think that's very important. I'm dealing with people and not with resources, so I can't only see them as work resources.

I've met many people who started to study psychology and then changed to computer science. This seems to be a pattern, at least in Germany.

Geertjan Wielenga: What's the connection between the two?

Rabea Gransberger: I think that, often, computer science people don't feel like they fit in with today's society.

They're probably trying to find out why they're different, so they go into psychology.

Through their studies, they learn that they should just do what they love to do and find other people who have the same thoughts. They meet them and then they build up their own micro-society of people.

Geertjan Wielenga: Thank you, Rabea Gransberger.