Ambience and Background
money is still as good as it was.
To make it short, yes it is! For a very reasonable ticket price you get two days full of talks spread over five tracks a decent catering and free water supply. The Business Design Center is a nice
location and of course London is always worth a visit.
In order to keep the ticket prices low the organizers have to bring a lot of sponsors, so the lobby was packed with stands. IMO this is not necessarily bad, at least you cab get a lot of goodies ;-)
Another cool thing is, that all talks are taped on video and the videos are all uploaded to youtube. So if you want to watch the talks just go to the Devoxx UK Channel
Day 1
Dot Con - James Veitch
James gave a summary of this experiences when messing with the people behind those emails and by that almost driving them mad. Usually I am not a fan of harrassing people, but if it happens to
frauds that try to steal the savings of innocent people who do not really understand that there is a whole con industriy out there, I strongly approve!
I highly recommend you watch the video to this talk, as no summary would do justice to it. It was hilarious.
Unfortunately it seems this video was not uploaded to the channel.. real pitty there...
Embracing Failure - Mazz Mosely
I chose this talk, because I remembered Mazz from a talk at the first Devoxx which was petty good, so I gave her another shot. You noticed immediately that she was very nervous speaking in front of
a rather large audience but apart from that the talk was good. The topic itself was more about what bad management looks like, especially when the project is in a bad phase. She drew the picture of
the typical jerk boss stereotype (pressumably from her first job) who responds to delays and errors by putting on more pressure but taking all the credit for success.
The story seemd to take a turn for the better when she told us about a meeting where she, as a young developer, dared to speak up in a review meeting, suggesting some improvements. Against all
expectations the more expirienced team mates backed her up and it seemed that from there on all would turn out good. But no, afterwarsd she got snubbed by the manager and it was clear that
there would be no happy future for her in this job. To make everything even sadder, the manager got promoted for the work the team did and no credit was left for those who actually saved the project.
In the end her morale was that you should speak, you should try to make your work a better place, even if it is hard. But if it turns out, that there is no way to make progress and that you will not be
happy where you are, then move on and find people who share the same values as you do.
Where's my free Lunch? - Hadi Hariri
For me, this one, can be summed pretty short. There are a huge number of online services that are, at a first glance, free. You can use them and no one is charging you. Hadi shows in detail in what way
you actually are paying for things like Google search or Facebook, just to name a few big ones. The bottom line is, you should not just blindly use everything out there. But make sure you protect your
data and understand what the service you are using, is taking from you in return.
Dials to 11 - Moderne Exteme Programming - Benjí Weber
Cool talk, revisting the principiles of Extreme Programming and Agile Development plus a few ideas and principile bulding on that. The concept I found most intriguing was Mob Programming, using the
brain power of the complete team to code complex core modules sounds like a really good idea. Other concepts revovled around Continious Deployment and Test Driven Development which did not strike me
as too revolutionary. The final point that I had to agree with is, that projects have to be refactored on a regular basis, especially when maintenance, testing, monitoring etc are too complicated.
Cybercrime and the Developer. How to start defending against the darker side of the web - Steve Poole
Now that topic did sound interresting, I was looking forward to hear about best practices against cyber attacks, backgrounds of the business etc. But in the end this was just the same old story of
"Check your app for security issues" and "The bad guys are out there" combined with some numbers on cyber crime and links to checklists for security issues. Breaking news.. And the biggest wtf moment
was a short advertisment break for a sponsor. Well, I am not going to get that time back...
Arduino and Java with the Intel Galileo - Simon Ritter
For this one, I was probably not the intended audience. I think I would have got more from it if I had at least some practial expirience with Arduino. Over a while it felt like an advertisement for
the Intel Galileo but soon turned into a report of the issues the Azul guys encountered when trying to get Java working on it.
Overall the style of the talk was good and it was interresting to hear what problems can occure on embedded platforms.
Extreme Profiling: Digging into Hotspots - Nitsan Wakart
Okay, this one went right into the nerd stuff. Nitsan gave a great overview over different profiling tools like VisualVM or Java Mission Control compared to what FlameGraphs in Java 8 can do and how
to use perf to help find performance issues within the Java application. If you like this kind of stuff, just go and watch the video, it is really insightful.
On Polymer and Smileys... or Polysmileys - Carmen Popoviciu
Finally some hands on coding! Carmen introduced the different features of Polymer and how it enables you to create reusable webcomponents. This was one of the talks where you saw from the first
second that the speaker really loves the topic. Carmen's passion and enthusiasm were very catching and the code examples she showed were precise, clear and easy to follow. One of my favorite talks
of this conference.
Polymer is abstracting the browser differences for webcomponents, but of course the webcomponent standard is changing. So Polymer has to adjust to those changes once those are final.
Busy Java Developers Guide to Hacking in Java - Ted Neward
Another talk with 10/10 nerd points. Ted had prepared a variety of special topics concerning tweakings of the jvm and the jdk. Basically it was an in depth tour of some of the more exotic settings
you can use to alter compiler and runtime behaviours. I must admit, I can't restate them here, so again I recommend watching the video. Ted's expertise combined with his presentation skills and his
relaxed and easy attitude made this a very enjoyable talk.
Knowledge is Power: Getting out of trouble by understanding Git - Steve Smith
I must admit, Steve knows Git. He gave an indepth overview of the basic principles Git was built upon. This started with the structure of the .git directory and how objects are created/stored and did
end with the power that the reflog gives you. In essence, if you screw up your git project, check the reflog to find the has before it all went wrong and then revert to that. For the details how to do
that just watch the video.
One thing I do not agree with though, is his hate towards git-flow. It is true, that the schema looks highly complicated and weird, but once you understand the basic system, it is rather simple and
intuitivly most teams implement something very similar. I do agree with his opinion, that you should only add as much complexity to your development workflow as necessary.
Git in Practice - John Stevenson
The last slot of the day was another Git topic, this time a Bird of Feathers (more a guided group discussion). Steve threw in some rather generic questions about workflows and team structures and
the group shared their experiences and opinions. There were no real surprises there, teams usually have some git flow like development process with feature and release branches that get merged back to
master/develop. One thing shocked my though, someone explained how their team uses code reviews to ensure code quality before merging the branch and, as I expected, there was a lot of nodding and
agreement among the other participants. But one guy spoke up and said, that he considers that sad because "you obviously don't trust each other". That was a huge wtf moment for me, but I was relieved
that noone else shared this view. A team where this kind of attitude is common can just mean that there must be a highly inconsistent code base.. *shudder*..
Day 2
Microsoft and Open Source? Microsoft and Java? Really? - Giles Davies
Well, the title says it all, really. Like most IT guys I have some reservations when it comes to Microsoft, this is of course caused by their actions in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. But seeing how
they are now trying to get to grips with IT reality (e.g. the development of Edge) I figured I give them a chance to convince me that they are not that bad anymore.
The picture Giles tried to draw was one of a "regular" IT company that uses different technologies to provide their customers with the best possible service. While that all sounded fair enough it was
more or less what was to be expected by this kind of talk. How much of this is really as good as it sounds only time can tell. But at least it is clear, that Microsoft tries to abandon it's old ways
and so they will probably again become a global player again who might rival with Apple or Google.
Composing Music in the Cloud - James Weaver
Mr JavaFX talking again. As always his experiences speaking style made the presentation itself worthwhile. The topic itself was nice but it actually did not blow my mind. Basically Jim did show how
he was using CloudFoundry to host a Spring-Boot application that can assist in different ways of music composition and how fast this can be done with modern technology.
If you are looking for some distraction after a work day with some kind of nerd flavour, this video is the way to go.
Java 9 Modularity in Action - Sander Mak, Paul Bakker
Oh yeah, some real bleeding edge stuff coming up. Sander and Paul gave a nice insight into the Java 9 modul concept that is intended to change how Java applications are written and run. One of the
main points for me is that this aweful classpath "thing" is meant to die with Java 9. Instead applications will be composed of moduels which expose certain classes and functions and can be combined
using provide and require declarations.
Does that sound familiar? Oh yes.. OSGI!!!! The concepts of OSGI are rather old, the last time I really had to do with that was back in 2003/2004. But so we meet again. Don't get me wrong, this is
nothing bad. I really like the concept of OSGI as it also allows you to have different versions of modules available at the same time etc. So I am excited to see how this works out when it comes to
the "regular" Java world.
Of course it is not so easy to upgrade to this new version, at least not when you want to follow the new paradigm. First of, the JDK and JRE are using the module structure too, so if your
application is doing something nasty with those resources, it is very lickely going to break with Java 9. And how do you migrate to the module structure? Every application has a lot of dependencies
and those have to be migrated as well. But that was taken care of, you can use jar files as so called automatic modules, that way you can upgrade your dependencies step by step.
The downside is, that in practice those upgrade will not happen soon at most companies, because they are expensive and risky. So we will have to wait and see when Java 9 will truely be taking over.
Refactoring to Java 8 - Trisha Gee
Not so much bleeding edge, but still a very interessting topic as Java 8 is, unfortunately, still new for most companies. In additon, a talk with Trisha is always worth listening to and so was this one.
What I liked most about her approach was, that she did not do any of that fanboy "omg, you have to use all the features asap because this is new and therefore better than, omg" stuff. Instead she
took some of the most popular Java 8 features and examined them closer in terms of: How easy is it to migrate? How much can go wrong? And how does the performance change?
The results were somewhat disillusioning, not only did some patterns prove pretty tricky to to migrate to but also the performance analysis showed that there was hardly any performance gain from
using the new features and in some cases peformance even dropped.
Bottom line is, you have to decide for each language feature and each use case independently if it worth to migrate and you always have to run performance tests on the code base to compare the
behaviour under high load. For everyone who is about to upgrade to Java 8, this video is a must watch!
Faster Java By Adding Structs (Sort Of) - Simon Ritter
And some more Java action! This time about the ObjectLayout project from the guys at Azul. The idea behind this is, to bring the performance advantages that C/C++ have compared to Java due to the use
of structs.
With a struct defintion the compiler knows exactly how large the struct object is and all objects do have the same size, as all elements are only pointers to the real data. That way the code can make
assumptions of where a certain object is within an array etc. and thus take short cuts during the execution.
This is what the ObjectLayout project tries to bring into Java. For details you better watch the video, as I am sure I will mix something up if I try to summarize it here. Pretty weird stuff.
Building multiplayer game using Reactive Streams - Michal Plachta
The last talk of the conference was again more hands on. Michal showed us, how Reactive Streams work and hwo those can be used to create a nice simple multiplayer game in a live coding session. Nice
topic and the coding was ratehr easy to follow, so for me this was a pretty good end to the conference.
Summary
As I said before, the value for money ratio on this conference is still great. Lots of talks and variety of topic to choose from with some very good and experienced speakers.
Of course there are some rather minor issues, or rather things that I would not need which I want to sum up just for completeness sake.
In comparission to the first year, there where less tables, seats and especially power plugs available. This makes it a but cumbersome for us techies with all our electronic devices. I understand
that the space is limited and the organizers preferred to put up more buffets for lunch but still it would be great to get some more set up in the future.
There are also more talk slots that I did not mention, for one the Ignite talks. A series of 5 Minutes talks about some small or humorous topics. I did not get much from them and I really don't
see the point of those. But obviously there is an audience for that. The other are 15 Minute talks during the lunch breaks. Usually you are in line waiting to get to the buffet and so don't have
time to listen to them. It seems to be pretty ungratifying to give such a talk. But again, this is in place since the first year, so some people seem to like it.
The one thing that really kinda bummed me out was the organization of the DevRoxx party. The party took place at the second evening, but it was not really advertised that much apart from the
closing talk of the conference. It as then that I took a closer look at the home page and finally found the section about it and then saw that you had to go to some of the sponsors to get a ticket
for the party. At that point it was of course to late, but we decided to give it a try and went to the location just to see that quite a lot of people did not know about the tickets. So it was
not just my problem ;-) So maybe that is something to improve for the years to come.
The last thing I want to criticize is that even during the closing talk not only the sponsor stands got removed but also the wifi was taken down, which can be a problem for foreigners who have no
data contract and who want to look up things, like e.g. the party location.
Even though this seems to be a lot to complain about I want to stress the point, that this is really good conference considering the cheap prizes and that I am very sure you will not regret coming
to this in the future.
