Have you ever wondered what it would take to become a speaker at JAOO? The answer is easy, actually: just invent something like Google, Enterprise Integration, or Spiral Development and your road to a JAOO speaker badge is short.

If you too happen to have failed to do this, all you can hope for is for the Programme Committee to see you doing something cool, like actually applying one of the above successfully or applying them unsuccessfully in an interesting way. You can catch our eye by being talented, hard-working and getting one of your great presentations caught on tape for us to see.

That being said, the PC actually taught X Factor’s Simon Cowell everything he knows about criticism, and evaluates potential speakers with no less brutal honesty than him.

Every year in January, the Programme Committee joins on a Caribbean Island to put together the JAOO technical program. We aim to focus on subjects, to create the program top-down by dividing it into tracks, as well as focusing on the right speakers and/or presentations, to create the program bottom-up. The reason for doing this in both directions, is that we need to do a lot of brainstorming before we decide, and we do not want to be tied to just proposing subjects or persons.

The subjects and speakers are chosen after what is (or hopefully will be) trendy, and what we in the PC believe every sublime developer should know. This is why parts of the program seem to be cake and other parts seem to be broccoli – being a 360 developer, you need both.