To San Francisco for QCon SF 2011, where I spoke on Java SE: Where We've Been, Where We're Going.

QCon is much further "up the stack" than JavaOne, so has far fewer talks about the "foundation", Java SE. I thought it was important to review the features delivered in Java SE 7 before discussing what's planned for Java SE 8. This worked out well, as most of the audience were using Java SE 6. The language changes in SE 7 look small, but examining merely two of them - precise rethrow and suppressed exceptions - reveals a new exception handling idiom applicable to many thousands of Java classes.

And thumbs up to the QCon organizers for the instant feedback mechanism!