Devoxx Belgium 2015 - Final thoughts #devoxx
Well yet another Devoxx is over for me, it must the 5th of 6th time (or more) can't remember to be honest. it's 3 years since my last one, so it was kind of a come back :).
Devoxx (Belgium) is growing, actually it is the first time that I have seen so many people. The venue must have increased the overall amount of attendees (3500?). That also means that it was the first time that some times, I did not managed to enter some talks due to the vast amounts of people waiting. Amazing and kind of a bummer, when you wait in line and then you cant go in.
The biggest change, just introduced this year is this. Yeap it is real, all the talks are already available online, in high quality. It is becoming a trend I guess these days, the same happened with JavaOne 3 weeks ago, you can find all the sessions here.
By the way I have composed a smaller public list in youtube, with a certain selection of talks that I managed to watch and some that I missed, so you can try my list as well.
This year I think I made a mistake, I skipped the first 2 University days. It seems that there were more talks or people that I would like to watch in the first 2 days than in the rest. So it was kind of a small disappointment for me.
It is more than obvious, especially after the _release almost instantly to youtube thing', that developer conferences are eventually becoming the place where you get to see some important people, get in touch with the community, do networking rather than accessing content which seems to be a secondary priority.
This year I was happy enough to see again good old friends from the global Java community and say hi, hear about their status in person and let them know about my new establishment, away from Greece that is. At the same time though, I kind of missed a lot of familiar faces as well, so yes I did get to see a lot of stars but also a large group was not there. I am not sure if the dates and the fact that Devoxx Belgium is so close to JavaOne or JavaZonze, relates with the above.
In the past 6-7 months unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you see things), I got the opportunity to do more research on technologies, try things, rather than get to my day job and code or maintain some legacy stuff. Which was kind of cool but not exactly my type of thing. So I was already full of new content, fed either by free content from recent conferences or some subscriptions to _e-learning' sites. So, this year I did not took so many notes on things to try or consider.
When it comes to technology trends, of course Devoxx is mainly a Java Developer's conference so Java is relevant in this context. As you will watch is some talks, we are entering a phase where technology trends are eventually hitting us more and more often, we are kind of overdosed not every 5 or 10 years but almost every year or half a year with the next big thing. I can still remember a couple of years, about alternative jvm languages,javascript & javascript etc. This year it was all about, functional programming, micro-services, containers. These are the trends.
I am very relieved that there are a lot of people out there (either in their talks or talking with them), are trying to build a wall of rational (as I envision it), trying to impose things like think before you buy or jump the next big thing',' technology A or technology is not going to fix your bad project' .fighting the silver bullet culture.
That is all, I hope that next year I will be able to make it more conferences, actually I very tempted to try if possible Devoxx London. See you there maybe or in a talk @ Luxembourg where I currently live.
Keep coding and loving Java :)