Devoxx 2014 – Infinite Possibilities
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:
- Pico Services with Java EE 7 on Java 8 and Docker by Adam Bien
- Java Futures Sneak Peek by Brian Goetz
- IntelliJ IDEA – Tips and Tricks by Hadi Hariri
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.
Interesting Facts
Attendees of Devoxx vote on certain topics on whiteboards. Check this great post: Devoxx 2014 – Whiteboard votes by Stephen Colebourne with these year hot topics.
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.