DevoxxUK 2017 - day1 - 10 years of JavaPolis / Devoxx for me #devoxxuk #devoxx
So, Devoxx Uk 2017. For me it's a 10 year anniversary for one of the best European and now global developer conferences. I still remember my first 2007 Javapolis at Antwrep, it's the conference I got to meet and get in touch with the broader Java community and people like Stephan J. The conference that I managed to meet the father of Java and many other Java Rock stars. The conference that I got to meet my wife (yes true story!)- a java developer as well :). So today as a Java family, living in London, we attended Devoxx UK 2017 for the very first time.
First you can judge the quality of the conference, from the amount of t-shirts and gadgets you managed to collect by your first day. As you can see, Devoxx UK was a great success : ) .
The event takes place at the Design Business center in Angel , we got so lucky because we live just around the corner, so it was an easy morning walk. Really impressive place, even though, I still prefer the cinema. Some rooms (not all of them) were not sound proofed and in some cases when you are seating in the back you could not see the speaker. Also, if you are used to cinema like chairs and auditoriums going back to conventional conference centers feels a bit weird. But anyway it was not that bad, maybe we are just spoiled by Devoxx :). I hope Devoxx-UK grows more, and then they can rent cinema rooms next year : ).
Talks
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Impressive stuff, but at some point I got lost, maybe not so easy to or too early to full grasp the magic of quantum physics.
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Great talk, really enjoy it! Laurent Victorino seems to be a charismatic speaker!
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A short session with M. Reihnold, defending project Jigsaw. I have made my mind about Jigsaw and I kind of agree with the emerged skepticism and arguments from the community, which has materialized to the infamous EC down vote. I did not get any extra points from the session apart from what we already know from both sides.
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Well I admit I am more into Spring lately, not completely sold, but I do follow some stuff that I consider nice. This was a typical code Spring :allthethings:session by J.Long. I am interested on the upcoming Spring Web Functions programming model + the RxJava Spring abstractions that are coming over.
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Interesting talk about the current state of the serveless movement and the available offerings. Personally I am not sold on the overall idea. I still consider the whole ecosystem, and the solutions are a nice to have for ad hoc or nice to have or don't care functionality. Maybe I am wrong. The talk gave some nice points on what you can and can not do if you consider going _serveless'. I still don't understand the term - it's just someone spinning containers that spin other containers containers for you.
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Really enjoyed this one. A Scala developer showing functional programming idioms in Java using one of my favorite libraries JavaSlang ( aka vavr.io). I really like vavr, and I do try to use as much as I can (or learn to use it). At the same time I do try to keep a balance especially in older code bases that are not functional at all, not ending up with hybrid - ugly procedural-O.O and some functions in the mix code. Something that makes me sad. The examples from the talk can be found here. Very nice worth checking out.
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Microservices for the Masses with Spring Boot, JHipster, and JWT
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I really like M.Raible his talk was around Spring and JHipster. I am amazed on how much this project has evolved. I mean seriously now it even spit's kubernetes deployment descriptors! I am not a huge fan of the Spring Cloud initiative that was also featured during the work- mostly the Okta architecture, but the latest JHipster, seems powerful enough to do the scaffolding for you as long as you like the core techs behind it, Spring +Angular 4.
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Gang of Four Patterns
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Huge fun of Mario Fusco. One of the best Java Twitter accounts and great speaker - with the right amount of black humor. Mario went through the behavioral design patterns from the GoF book, and re-implemented then using functional programming paradigms. You can find the code here.
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I think that was my favorite talk of the day. Russel Winder is a very charismatic speaker with lots of experience on his shoulder and lots of strong opinions - which infuses lots of energy to his talks. I happen to invest in my free time in Kotlin (this must be a separate blog post). I was kind of tired with Scala, tried a couple of times, and I still consider it unnecessarily complex for my taste of needs, at the same time I was feeling that Java is cool but it is not the answer to everything. So while searching and trying other stuff, I got a small push - like yes try it you will really like it from my ex-manager and great colleague at Ticketmaster (thanks Joel) which I trust a lot on his tech views. It was a love at first code, in the beginning I felt that I am coding in some sort of Java with Lombok and Javaslang - of course the more you go through the lang the more you discover new and interesting stuff. I am still learning but Kotlin is in my heart now, and I can easily find my self in the future coding Java and Kotlin in parallel / professionally!
That's all for today! Greetings from London : ) .