DevoxxUK 2017 - day2 #devoxxuk #devoxx

May 13, 2017 devoxx
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With one day delay here is my second day review of Devoxx UK 2017.

  • Front End for Back End developers, Matt Raible

  • I personally don't fancy front-end development mostly because of my dislike towards JavaScript, but I do like to stay in touch with the technology trends, understand the basics of the frameworks. Most of the time eventually all the API and backend systems that I help develop, have to power a Single Page Application or some sort of JS front-end. On this talk M.Raible went through the current trends on Javascript / Frameworks, tooling for front-end developers and ways for a back-end minded dev to start coding on the other side. Not bad at all.

  • The diabolical developer's guide to performance tuning , Martijn Verburg

  • I could not miss a talk from Martijn, by far one of my favorite conference speakers of all time. Very nice and pragmatic presentation regarding performance tuning and the mind set behind discovering or tackling such problems.

  • Some worth taking notes like _Every developer should spend some time and learn about the underlying hardware that powers his application'

  • Don't try to outsmart javac neither the JIT compiler, most of the times they are smarter than you, and will produce or inline code better than your attempts on the source code.

  • Code first for maintainability and simplicity, then measure and then you can code for performance (if you have such problems)

  • Try JITWatch

  • Real world Java 9, Trisha Gee

  • Always enjoy the java talks of Trisha Gee, she went through live coding and upgrading an older project she has showed off in previous conferences and talks to Java9. You can find here a full blog post with the slide and the code for her talk. What I will keep from this talk is that currently adopting Java9 on production code is not a walk in the path, especially if you want to fully adopt Java modules. I am not saying that is rocket science but I am really confused by small things like, source code layout that needs to change (by the way WHY PEOPLE! I still remember the days of Ant where every developer kind of imposed his own structure), or repackaging or restructuring of existing code bases. Jigsaw aside, the talk featured some other hot features of Java9, like the introduction of ReactiveStreams aka Flow API.

  • An introduction to Kotlin by Example

  • Another Kotlin related talk which I really enjoyed. As I have previously elaborated Kotlin has a place in my developer heart and I try to learn it in my spare time and think of ways that I could use it in some of my projects. Very nice talk.

  • Slides of the talk and the examples can be found here.

  • I really liked the 99 problems with Kotlin challenge. Try some of the examples even if your solution is not 100% aligned with the author, because you did not leverage recursion or tail recursion, it's a nice way to get used of the Kotlin standard API.

Overall it was a great, conference. I am really looking forward to the next one. My conference time is not over though, next week I am flying back to my home country Greece to attend Voxxed Athens. I am very proud to be member of the program committee. So see you in Athens next week, of course related blog posts will follow.