JavaOne is dead, long live Devoxx.
This year I had the privilege of attending Devoxx Belgium (or just Devoxx as it was called before it went international in 2012). This is my 5th year of attending and my first time since 2012.
Having found myself locked out of the main keynote room in previous years due to the number of people, I made sure I was there over an hour early this time. This turned out to be a good idea since the queue to enter the room was huge even over 45 minutes before the scheduled kick-off.
The two keynotes this year were both excellent but also very contrasting. First up was Mark Reinhold giving us a roundup on the progress of Project Jigsaw and how it will affect Java development from Java 9 onwards. It is always good to hear what Oracle are up to with regard to future Java versions. However, after the amazing Java 8 together with the fact that Project Jigsaw has been discussed for years now, you kind of feel that the next few years of Java releases will be slow burners rather than the massive and fast positive response of Java 8.
Second up was something completely unrelated to Java. Professor Lawrence M. Krauss gave a very interesting talk on the universe and the origins of time and space. The talk was even scattered with references to Java modules. This was my first introduction to Lawrence Krauss but I’ll be sure to check him out in the future.
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), the popular general conference talks were just as crowded as the keynotes. I soon realised that the only way to have a guaranteed entrance to a talk you really want to hear, is to wait outside at least 10 minutes before. This normally means giving up the toilet/snack break in-between sessions to queue for the room.
The overall quality of the talks this year was really high. There were only a couple of duds, with most talks sharing some great technical knowledge and presenting some great insights. I found Venkat Subramaniam’s session on Design Patterns in Java 8 to be particularity interesting.
Chaos in Practice
Another interesting talk was Chaos Engineering by Loin Hochstein. Lorin is an engineer at Netflix. The talk was all about the principles of the engineering approach taken by Netflix that has resulted in some popular open source libraries like SimianArmy and Hystrix as well as some excellent naming like Chaos Monkey. What I found really unique about this talk was the way this “American” engineering approach was contrasted against “European” engineering practices.
Loin likened the American chaos engineering to the Eric Ries MVP approach. However, in Europe, the engineering approach is more mathematical in nature and finds its roots in the more formal methods devised by people like Edsger W. Dijkstra. A very interesting point of view, even if I’m not 100% sure I agree with it. There was also a high level overview of the processes and architecture used by Netflix. The talk is well worth a watch.
For the first time, all of the talks from this year’s Devoxx are already online and can be viewed here for free. In years gone by, these videos would have taken months to appear so this is a great improvement, even if it does signal the death of parleys.com.
Trends
Alongside Java 8/9 and beyond, the general trend for this year was unsurprisingly microservices and containers. The last time I attended, the take away from the conference was alternative languages on the JVM and mainly Scala. Of course there were still some talks around these this year but not nearly as many. It appears that Java 8 has been successful in scratching the functional itch of Java developers.
For anyone looking for a Java conference to attend next year I’d highly recommend Devoxx Belgium. If the amazing content and excellent speakers haven’t convinced you — it’s worth remembering that they probably have the greatest conference rooms and most comfortable seats of any conference I’ve ever attended.
