I'm on the way back from a great experience in Cluj, Romania: the Oracle Developer Day that was held here today. After the Oracle Developer Day in Warsaw, two days ago, I flew to Bucharest and then had to wait about 6 hours for the flight to Cluj. So I spent several of those hours in a taxi, with a very nice driver who showed me all over the place in Bucharest, such as the Palace of Parliament (according to Wikipedia, "the world's largest civilian building, most expensive administrative building, and heaviest building"):

He also taught me a lot of Romanian. (My current phonetic-based vocabulary can be admired and/or ridiculed here.)

Meeting Emilian Bold (third on the right below) from the NetBeans Dream Team was a definite highlight:

The above shows the three speakers on the Java Track "preparing" for their sessions; me, Lukas Jungmann, and Emilian Bold.

In Oracle's Gregor Rayman's keynote, this particular slide responded well to my NetBeans heart:

The "Java Track" had sessions on Java EE 6, the NetBeans Platform, and Java Web Services, as well as "What's New in NetBeans IDE 7.1", where Emilian, shown in action below, outlined the NetBeans community, e.g., the NetBeans Dream Team and the NetBeans governance board. (But it was all in Romanian so I'm not really sure what was said exactly!)

Finally, there was time to recover from the whole day, right before my trip back to Bucharest:

All in all a great day! Looking forward to remaining in touch with the many people I met today.