This month I had an opportunity to attend Devoxx Belgium, which is the biggest Java community conference in Europe with 3500 participants and 215 speakers. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to participate in the university part of it (the first two days) so I started on Wednesday, the first day of the conference part.
Highlights
Aside from the lectures (which I will review below), there were two things I really liked about Devoxx Belgium.
The first of them was the Hackergarten. It was a place where you could sit with your laptop, meet open source contributors and even contribute yourself if you wanted to. Thanks to Andres Almiray I have made a small pull request myself. There were actually some people who didn’t attend lectures at all but spent whole conference at the Hackergarten. It wasn’t that much of a problem — recordings were available on YouTube on the next day!
The other thing that appealed to me was the fact that Devoxx Belgium allowed the participants with golden tickets to review the proposals in CFP. You could get a golden ticket if you were one of the first 500 to register for the event. This year there were 108 active voters and the best of them reviewed 692 proposals! Impressive.
The opening keynote
The first day of the conference was the day after the United States presidential election. In the morning before the keynote speech it was quite certain that Donald Trump would become the next president. This fact obviously was mentioned during the opening by presenting a tweet of @DevoxxTrump:
Later interesting new events in Devoxx/Voxxed family were introduced:
- Devoxx US which had the same number of CFP proposals as Devoxx Belgium and a heap of great speakers
- Voxxed CERN — this is a new conference at the home of the Large Hadron Collider. The number of tickets is limited to only 225 so you better register fast if you want to attend
Pepper (a humanoid robot) also appeared again this year and was used as a client application for the “Ask Devoxx” prototype, which is a project from Stephan Janssen, James Weaver, Daniel De Luca and Sandhya Kapoor. This application, using the services of IBM Watson, allowed Daniel De Luca to have a simple conversation with Pepper about Devoxx US.
There were few other short talks during the opening keynote:
- Guillaume Laforge, aided by an interview with Google Senior Fellow Jeff Dean, explained how machine learning is used at Google
- Mark Reinhold told us about the most important new features of Java 9. He also presented a live demo of JShell, the first REPL for Java with a history of commands and tab completion. JShell was later quite useful for presenting the features of the most anticipated feature of Java 9 — Jigsaw
- Brian Goetz introduced the concepts that will probably be included in the later versions of Java — Project Valhalla (value types and other features) and Project Panama (a new bridge between Java and native code)
- Cliff Click showed how to explain in simple words and real life references what a compiler is to your mother. This is an interesting problem that I imagine all developers experience from time to time — how to explain what you do to non-programmers.
Conference talks
During the conference there were a lot of interesting talks. My top picks are:
Using Machine Learning to Enhance your apps
Sara Robinson and Mete Atamel introduced Google Cloud Vision and Speech APIs. They demoed a few easy ways to use this platform to apply machine learning to your own projects. Vision API makes it possible to obtain a lot of information about the image — labels, faces, texts, landmarks, explicit content and logos. Speech API converts sound to text.
I am not sure yet how to use it in one of my current projects, but it’s certainly good to know that if you need this kind of functionality, you don’t need to write it yourself. Instead, you can use the Google Cloud API.
How Google DeepMind conquered the game of Go
Roy van Rijn gave us a history of AI algorithms used for playing games like Chess, and why they weren’t sufficient for Go. Go is a game where average number of available moves at any given time is about 250. The average number of moves made by both players during the whole game is about 300. In addition, there are 1.74×10¹⁷² unique positions of the game board. He also explained how neural networks, machine learning and randomized algorithms dealt with this complexity and lead to a great achievement of AlphaGo: an application that won a game of Go against one of the most dominant players in the world a few months ago.
Security and Microservices
Sam Newman touched on an important subject. It seems that people keep focusing on the advantages of microservices but tend to forget about additional security issues that come with it. Sam not only shared a lot of guidelines how to design a secure system but also discussed a few of the famous responses of big companies to security problems.
The example I liked the most was about the drug Tylenol. After Tylenol killed several people in 1980s, all of it was recalled from US retailers and tamper resistant capsules were introduced. It costed the manufacturer more than 100 mln $. However the replacement had the same market share as Tylenol. It perfectly showed that an immediate and determined reaction can save the situation in the long run.
Flying services with the drone
Last but not least — the best speech this year (4.84 out of 5 with 146 votes)! This was a very entertaining and humorous session done by Krzysztof Kudrynski and Blazej Kubiak. They talked about two projects they did using a drone. The purpose of the first one was to track a runner from the sky. The second one was designed to create a map of the surroundings, localize something on it and move it from one place to another. They showed a nice demo and clearly explained the problems they encountered and how they dealt with them.
The closing keynote
The closing keynote was done by Virtual JUG Java Council — Simon Maple, Martijn Verburg, Emmanuel Bernard and Trisha Gee. It was much less formal than opening, with beer and Java Council members mimicking Pepper’s appearance at the opening keynote. There was also a more serious part - a tribute to the life of Daniel deOliveira, who was a Java champion and recently passed away.
On the last day, it was really sad to see the empty first floor as the sponsors’ booths were packed away. It was even sadder to leave. But not for long— Devoxx US is coming up in March and registration/CFP for Devoxx Poland and Devoxx UK has already started!
