The third edition of Devoxx UK 2015 was in London, between 17th and 19th June. This was my first conference since I joined Tomitribe. The dynamics were a little different for me this time. I actually had a triple role: attendee, speaker and exhibitor. Since Tomitribe was also sponsoring the event I had to spend some time at our booth to interact with other developers using TomEE and to promote to the ones that don’t know it yet. During that time, we also worked to push out the latest release of TomEE with most of the Java EE 7 support!
Venue
Devoxx UK was held at the same location as last year: The Business Design Centre. This year, more rooms were available, since the number of attendees was also higher. I don’t have the exact number, but I guess that close to 1 thousand might have attended the event. The Exhibition Hall was more or less the same, but I was surprised to see that some usual sponsors didn’t make it this time. The Community Hall pretty much had a non-stop Hackergarten well managed by Heather VanCura. By the way, what is wrong with the picture? I rule as a photographer, right? 🙂
Sessions
The program was interesting enough, a lot of diverse subjects and you had five options to attend on each scheduling bracket. I was not always into sessions, since I also needed to spend some time in the Exhibition and Community Halls. Not a problem, because all the sessions were recorded and are going to be available on Parleys, which is cool. These are my top 3 sessions (from the ones I have attended):
You should get the first two sessions on Parleys. But the third one is already available:
Also, have a quick look to this awesome Ignite Session by Tonya Rae Moore:
My Session
I’ve got to speak about the Five Ways to Not Suck at Being a Java Freelancer. It may sound a little strange, since I’ve put the Freelancer life on hold. I’ve submitted the session before that event and I think it’s still valid to provide some of my experience during my Freelancer life. Here is a session about it:
This is not exactly related to the conference itself, but since I was in London I’ve met with my good friend Simon Maple to conduct our second Book Reading session. If you are not aware, vJUG started a new initiative: the Book Reading Club. The idea is for the attendees to gather around a book, read it and discuss it. We started with the awesome book Effective Java by Joshua Bloch. We had our second meeting around the book and it was fun to hear Josh explain some of the decisions made around the development of the Collections API, Generics and For each statement. A must see:
Community
The Community was awesome as always! This time I had the pleasure to have with me some very good friends from Portugal:
When thinking of stuff to do in the Hackergarten, I had the idea to write a small piece of code to perform Method Caching using the new JCache API. I’ve soon discovered that I’ve gotten beaten by Andy Gee (no hard feelings). Anyway, we had some interesting discussions about it with Bruno Baptista and Sebastian Daschner. Check the result: JCacheExamples.
Java EE BoF
Also on the Java EE BoF we had the usual discussion between Java EE and Spring. In my honest opinion, I think this discussion is pointless. Both technologies can be used together and everyone is free to pick the parts that fit their project more. On the other hand, I think that Spring has done a fantastic job with Spring.io website. Java EE has a lot of information, but it’s all spread around the Internet. I believe that this causes a bad impression to new developers and in the end they may end up favouring Spring more.
Also, the adoption of Java EE 7 has been slow in the organizations. There is no Application Server support yet and companies are lacking the resources to perform the migration. I’ve personally been working in a Java EE 5 to 7 migration and I intent to make a session about it.
20 Years of Java
Do you have any idea what was going on when Java was born?
During the event, there was a lady taking polaroid pictures of developers. These pictures went into a wall and organized by the year you wrote the first line of Java code. I remember that it was in 1996 for me. I was writing an HTML website, but was unhappy that I couldn’t do any kind of dynamic behaviour. Searching on the web, I’ve found the solution: Java Applets! I bought a book called “Learn Java in 30 Days” and I wrote my first line of Java in the Notepad. I wondered where was IntelliJ at that time!
Final Thoughts
That’s all! Hope you enjoyed this report. Cya next year!
This year, Devoxx Belgium was held between 10 and 14 November at its usual place, Antwerp – Metropolis Business Center. This was my second time at Devoxx BE and I’ve enjoyed my time there. Unfortunately, none of my submitted sessions were selected for this event. It’s very hard to get im there, since there are so many good submissions. Check the program here.
Announcements
Devoxx is going to Poland. The popular 33rd Degree Conference is rebranding to Devoxx.
Parleys has a new look and it’s now possible to enroll in online courses by recognised experts from across the tech sector.
A new knowledge sharing platform was revealed: Voxxed.com. Here you should be able to find the most recent news about Java and JVM technologies. When the platform was being demoed, the server crashed with everyone in the audience trying to access it. A funny moment, but the platform is stable now, and had no problems accessing it afterwards.
A new brand of smaller conferences was launched as Voxxed Days. These are one day tech events organised by local community groups and supported by the Voxxed team. Check the schedule. Voxxed Days are going to be in Vienna, Ticino, Istanbul and Berlin. Maybe we can bring them to Portugal too!
Sessions
I’ve spent most of my time in the Hackergarten, but I’ve also attended a few sessions. I recommend to have a look into these:
All the sessions will be on Parleys. So keep an eye on it.
There are a lot of sessions dedicated or related to Docker. It seems to be the next big thing. It would be interesting to see if Docker is going to be threat to multi-platform Java and open the path to other technologies. I don’t believe in it, since Java evolved way more than that, but let’s see what is going to happen.
We also got to see the very last podcast of The Java Posse. Thank you for all the great content produced for the Java community since 2005.
All results should be looked carefully, since these represent a very small number of developers at a top tech conference. Still, it’s interesting to see a very good adoption of Java 8 and IntelliJ IDEA being the number one IDE these days. What made me wonder was the huge amount of web frameworks or techniques (I’ve counted 27!) to build web applications. Diversity is good, but anyone else feels that something is really wrong here?
Final Words
It was great to attend Devoxx and to hang out live with the persons you usually only interact online. If you have never been to a conference, you should definitely consider attending Devoxx. Probably the reference conference for Europe.
(Please serve better food next year)!
I’ve travelled next to the Java2Days conference in Sofia – Bulgaria. So expect a post about that one too.
I was in London between 12 and 13 June to attend the second edition of Devoxx UK. The conference was first scheduled to take place in April, but was later moved on to June. I guess it was a good call, since it was so close in dates to Devoxx Paris (that was also held in April) and they would probably overlap. I submitted a few sessions for Devoxx UK, but unfortunately they were not selected. I have to confess that since I was not selected I was not planning to go, but I’m getting conference addicted and the next conference I have scheduled is JavaOne 2014 in late September (where I’m going to speak). I realised that I couldn’t stay so much time without attending something, so I decided to signup just a few days before the conference started.
Venue
The Business Design Centre is a venue which houses exhibitions and consumer fairs and was also the place for Devoxx UK. The conference was only occupying a small fraction of the total venue capacity. We did not have the cinema like rooms from Devoxx BE, but the rooms were nice, the Exhibition Hall was well designed and there was also another floor for the community activities: Hackergartens, BOF sessions and hands-on-labs. Unfortunately, both the Exhibition Hall and the Community Hall were very warm in my opinion, good only to be on a beach or pool with a cold drink on the side.
Sessions
The program was interesting enough, a lot of diverse subjects and you had four options to attend on each scheduling bracket. I was not always into sessions, since I also wanted to spend some time in the Exhibition and Community Halls. Not a problem, because all the sessions were recorded and are going to be available on Parleys, which is cool. Devoxx UK kicked-off with a very inspirational keynote by Dan North about building a career and the interactions that impact you and the ones around you. I advice you to check it out when the video is available. These are my top 3 sessions (from the ones I have attended):
Unfortunately, there were also a couple of negative things. One of the sessions that I really wanted to attend the speaker didn’t show up, and in another the speaker arrived really late. I even considered jumping in and replace the missing speaker, but I didn’t have my laptop and I was not sure if the organization or the other attendees would enjoy the idea 😀 .
Food
Call me weird, but I really need hot meals for lunch and dinner. The Devoxx food, and not only in the UK (it was the same in BE, I don’t know about FR), it’s bad for my taste, so I ended up going outside for some food. Idea: There is no need to have something fancy, just get some chicken and charcoal and you can have a pretty tasty roasted barbecued chicken. I can even do it myself!
Community
The Community was awesome as always! This is now starting to be one of the mains reasons that make me want to attend more and more conferences. Once again a contributed a few little bits of code for the Java EE 7 Samples in the Hackergarten with Heather VanCura, Arun Gupta, Peter Pilgrim and Andres Almiray.
I was also able to bring a few goodies to offer in the next Coimbra JUG Meeting. Thanks to Kaazing and JCP.org for the books they offered and Atlassian for the t-shirts.
It was great to meet again a few guys (and girls) from others events (in no particular order):
And a special thanks for Peter Pilgrim for giving me a signed copy of his Java EE 7 Developer Handbook. Congratulations Peter, for the huge job that is to write a book!
Next Devoxx UK
Devoxx UK is returning again in 2015, and now with 3 days instead of 2 (running from 17 to 20 June of 2015). I’m submitting again for 2015 and I’m positive that I will have something selected next year!
I had the opportunity to attend last Devoxx in Belgium. It was my first time attending a Devoxx conference and it was an awesome conference. During the event, I joined an Hackergarten organised by Arun Gupta and had the chance to contribute tests for a suit of Java EE 7 Samples in Github. Since I’m very interested in Batch processing, I started to write a few tests for the JSR-352 samples and very quickly we found a possible bug in the specification.
So, Arun Gupta told me how could I report the bug and check all the information related with the JSR-352 and told me about the JCP and the Adopt a JSR processes. The bug that we found was already reported and you can check it here.
I later met Heather VanCura that manages the JCP Program Office and she was very interested in the experience I just had at the Hackergarten. For that reason, I was interviewed to tell my own story and hopefully inspire other developers to contribute to the JCP or the Adopt a JSR processes. Here is the interview:
I continue to contribute to the Java EE 7 Samples project and you are also invited to do so if you wish. I’ve found more bugs and this is my first report and contribution to the Java ecosystem.
Devoxx UK was held at the same location as last year: The Business Design Centre. This year, more rooms were available, since the number of attendees was also higher. I don’t have the exact number, but I guess that close to 1 thousand might have attended the event. The Exhibition Hall was more or less the same, but I was surprised to see that some usual sponsors didn’t make it this time. The Community Hall pretty much had a non-stop Hackergarten well managed by Heather VanCura. By the way, what is wrong with the picture? I rule as a photographer, right? 🙂
