Devoxx UK 2016

Ambience and Background

Three years ago London saw the first installment of Devoxx UK which I had the pleasure to visit. This year I decided it was time to come back and see how the conference has evolved and if it's value for
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

The opening talk was a great start to the conference. A very funny narrative of what happens when you actually reply to scammer emails (like Nigeria Connection etc.) but in a special way.

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.

Devoxx UK 2013

This year Devoxx came to the UK for the first time after having a record of rather successful editions in Belgium. After failing to attend the Devoxx in Belgium for a few times due to loaded work schedules at the end of the year I thought why not try the UK edition in March, so this year was my first Devoxx as well.

 

General stuff

I must admit as it was the first UK Devoxx I was expecting a lot of issues and stuff going wrong, as it usually happens when an event gets organized for the first time. But to my pleasant surprise the whole event went very smooth and it was over all a lovely experience so I will definitely try to be back for the next editions. It was noticeable that the organizers put a lot of effort as well as sweat and tears into everything and that they really cared about it. We had some sponsor booths that handed out goodies, some raffles (I even won an infinispan book at the red hat raffle ;-)), free wifi (yes, everyone takes that for granted nowadays but still…) and an app to plan your talks, the latter was a bit buggy though but that was fixed for next year, so it is also a plus for me.

That said there are also a few things I think could be improved or suggestions that came to my mind and that I would like to share here. What bothered me somewhat was for one, that one BOF almost did not happen as the responsible speaker just did not show up. BUT cudos to Dan from the organization who took a few minutes of his time to get the group started about what a BOF is about (mainly more a big discussion among everyone who showed up rather than a regular talk) so we put up a list of questions and issues and just went from there. The other thing that pissed me off a bit was that the abstracts of the talks quite often did not resemble what the speaker really spoke about in the end. Quite a few times the topic form the abstract was done within 5 minutes and the rest of the time was spent on stuff related to it and even though it was usually also interesting it was not what one expected and it is annoying when you realize that 20 minutes into a 50 minutes slot. And yes, I am aware that this is a common problem at conferences but hey, it can’t hurt to mention it ;-)

Regarding suggestions the following things came to my mind:

• Put the wifi access data into the welcome package
• Try to have more power supplies in the talk rooms for people that want to try out coding examples on the fly because recharging in the breaks is usually not sufficient
• The website did not say too precisely what kind of refreshments would be available for free and which ones would be sold (at least neither I nor my mates knew about that) and free tab water would have been cool (or did we just miss that?)
• Maybe don’t shut down the wifi as soon as the ending keynote is over ;-)
• The Quickies on the first day really cut into the lunch break and in order not to gulp done your meal you had to skip one of them while on the second day there were only half as many  and in general longer breaks. Would be cool if that could be evened out a bit in the future
• Lunch was a broad variety of sandwiches, wraps and bagels so I think everyone found something suitable but the fact you had to give away a lunch coin when picking up your meal caused people to stack up their plates quite a bit and I am sure that not all of it was eaten in the end.

I know that all of that is nothing crucial and as I said before it was a nice conference and everyone should consider attending in the future. Oh right, move the date to summer!!! ;-)

 

Day 1

 

Keynote

Not much to say here, nice introduction of the team and the obligatory Queen joke that did not catch on much. Then there was a humorous talk by Kevlin Henney about the everyday life of programmers and developers with some funny analogies etc.

 

Continuous Delivery – David Farley

Good introduction talk about CD and even though I am familiar with the topic it did help to reiterate over the concepts and think about how they can be applied to your current work. The things I remember most are:

• Do the difficult/annoying stuff as often as possible so you get better at it
• Use the same deployment mechanism for each environment, something that we do only partially right now
• Automate as much as possible
• Everybody is responsible to get the stuff done

Especially the last point got me thinking what we can do at my work place. If you have external client applications that depend on your backend and that run on certain mobile devices you have to use those for your acceptance tests and this cannot automate those at least for new features.

 

Banking, how hard can it be? – John Davies

Somehow I was hoping for a bit more in this talk. Basically John pointed out how hard it is to establish new technologies in a large bank or any other big company. The sheer amount of Oracle databases that where in use at that particular bank was quite overwhelming (several thousands) and the idea you have to migrate all of them kinda blew my mind. All in all it sounded like an overly complex environment and the migration project was surely a huge effort. Also interesting was the fact that the FPML data structure in use in the banking sector could not be simply thrown at regular ORM tools like hibernate because those would generate 1700+ tables. He then did show some in memory dbs that they used instead but I must admit that I don’t remember which ones because it just was not very important to me.

 

Intro to NoSQL for busy developers (Quickie) – Trisha Gee and Kim Ross

Trisha and Kim gave a brief overview over the different types of NoSQL databases:

• Graph
• Document
• KVS
• Column Family
• Sorted Maps

Also some typical use cases for a few of those and how eventual consistency works. This talk got me thinking if MongoDB was the best choice for our use case, maybe Riak or some Column Family database would have been more suitable.

But what I want to point out the most is that rhetorical this was an extremely pleasant talk, Trisha and Kim created a very comfortable atmosphere and it was just nice to listen to them. That is not a given at tech talks ;-)

 

Applications’s development using JavaFX2 – Thierry Wasylczenko and Jim Weaver

Now this was one I put great hopes in, I knew Jim Weaver’s book on JavaFX from a few years back and figured he would give some insights on the changes.  Thierry’s part was okay information wise apart from that he did not intend to give a demo of the visual editor even though that was announced in the abstract. Jim then said he’d cut his part 5 minutes short so we can see that demo, nice gesture but should not have been necessary in the first place. The downside of Thierry’s talk was that it was really monotone and hard to understand. To me it seemed that he had not much talking experience and I hope he does practice on that some more because I guess he could become a good speaker with his technical knowledge. So Thierry, if you read this, consider it an encouragement ;-)

Then Jim took over but not with much JavaFX stuff but instead he was talking about Java 8 features like Nashorn support, Websockets and web workers. All in respect to how they can be help with JavaFX development but still it was not quite what I was hoping for. But of course it was a good talk, so I am not unhappy with it.

 

Stop doing retrospective and start your Toyota Kata – Mattias Karlsson and Hakan Forss

This one was something different. Mattias and Hakan prepared a dialog where Mattias acted as a scrum master and Hakan was Kata coach that gave Mattias an introduction and they went through a typical Kata cycle together. Even though both were clearly not actors and should not try to become ones it was very refreshing and also entertaining.

Kata is a method to improve your processes in a continuous way. You first have to find out where you are at and write down your current state then you set a vision that should be quite ambitious as well as a set of target conditions that are some kind of intermediate goals you want to achieve. For a cycle you choose a target condition and how to reach it, that is your challenge. That is the improvement Kata. In the coaching Kata you then do some kind of mini retro to see what you accomplished and what problems you have. The cycles can be quite short, maybe even one or two days.

 

Hitting the limits of your hardware with Java – Peter Lawrey

 

Okay, this one was a disappointment, sorry I have to say it so harsh but that is how I feel. The sad thing is, that Peter Lawrey does know his stuff but in this talk, sheesh. First of all it was very hard to understand him then he did not really cover the basic problems a programmer should be aware of or how you can help with proper coding to avoid hardware limitation issues. Instead he did show slides with some performance tests he made and the resulting graphs. Also some graphs of performance issues and the audience had to guess what caused the problems. And then after 20 minutes (of a 50 minutes slot) he ended his talk for questions. The questions were then not even repeated aloud so that everyone knew what they were talking about. Well... enuff said..

 

Lambdas and Collections in Java 8 – Maurice Naftalin

Simply a good talk. Covered the basics of lambdas and how they can be used with collections for efficient coding. How and why the boilerplate parts can be omitted, what map reduce is about plus Guava features like Optional and Predicate that are part of Java 8. Pleasant to listen to, so nothing for me to moan about ;-)

 

Beyond Beauty: JavaFX, Parallax, Touch, Gyroscopse and much more (BOF) – Angela Caicedo

This was basically how you can get a pseudo 3D illusion with motion sensors to run on Raspberry PI with JavaFX. Well, it was not that much FX stuff in it, and most of the time was spent on the hardware spec of the PI and how sensors and signals can be read on pin level. IMO that was not too useful especially the latter as all of that is abstracted by the PI4J lib she introduced in the end. But it was a nice demo and it was obvious she knows her stuff. As that BOF ended early I staggered into another one of the same slot.

 

Is NAO your robotic overlord? (BOF) – David Snowdon

NAO is very impressive small robot, but this just seemed like a product demo, so no conference stuff IMO.

 

Get your head around git, Team Collaboration – John Stevenson

Now, John did not show up, no clue why. But Dan from the organization team spent a few minutes with us and got us started. We put down some questions people had and tried to answer them in a group discussion. Two voluntary helpers where also there and those had some git experience. I myself have only used git-svn until now but to my surprise this meant I had the third most knowledge on this subject in the whole group. But it was an interesting discussion so now time wasted for me.

 

Opening the hidden door: JavaFX development everywhere (BOF) – Angela Caicedo

So we met again ;-) This time there were only 4 people in total so we got together at a table and Angela gave a short presentation how packaging and development works with JavaFX. Of course I had some things to complain ;-) Like finding out in what mode you are, embedded or not, depends if the main routine gets a stage object handed to it that is something that should be abstracted by a static method call returning an enum. But it was informative and as such a nice end for the first day.

 

Day 2

 

Creating Games with WebGL and Three.js – James Williams

Cool talk. Gave a good overview of what WebGL can do, where it is supported what the drawbacks are and how Three.js as an abstraction layer can help to immensely reduce those by wrapping a lot of stuff. Gave me the urge to check it out and toy around with it.

 

Getting started with Websocket and Server-Sent Events using Java – Arun Gupta

Even though it took me some time to get used to the Indian accent, this was a solid talk. We saw detailed examples how Websockets and Server-Sent Events can be implemented, what client requirements they impose and also a working live demo. Kind of obvious but still worth to mention are the main differences between the two technologies. Websockets are truly bi-directional but require special browser support for it, while Server-Sent Events can be implemented using plain HTTP and thus can run on any browser but only provide one way communication. Websockets provide mapping functionality for JSON, binary and other request types and parameters are typed according to their position. I am sorry I don’t have much more to say here because this talk was surely a good one.

 

Dark Side of Agile – Mazz Mosley

Mazz spoke about her experiences with a large agile team working on the UK government website and what problems she witnessed. Sadly she did not provide any new insights or yet unknown solutions, it was more stuff that everyone with project experience already knew. Like that it can cause problems when the team is growing too fast, that documentation is essential but must not be overdone and team spirit is vital to success. But what I like was the way she presented her talk, very solid speaking, funny anecdotes and nice to listen too. So I hope to see her at another Devoxx again, maybe with a more complex topic.

 

What do you mean, backwards compatibility? – Trisha Gee

Now this topic sounded extremely interesting, finding new ways to change APIs without breaking the clients is always useful and after Trisha’s first talk on Day 1 I was really looking forward to this one.  Unfortunately the backwards compatibility part was done in five minutes as the original driver did use the wrong package namespace “com.mongo” instead of “org.mongo”, so the new API simply uses the new namespace and the old API can still coexist. Well, that’s what I call a disappointment. At least the talk itself was entertaining and had some interesting bits of information about the monog project itself. But still if I had known beforehand I would have chosen a different talk for this slot.

 

Does your WAR resemble the world’s largest bowl of spaghetti? Enterprise OSGi can help – Holly Cummins

Entertaining, solid talk about the basics of OSGi. While we have quite a few visibility mechanisms inside JARs etc. there is nothing like that on the level of JARs itself so the classpath gets rather polluted by all classes of all JARs even though only a few should be exposed. Also searching for classes throughout the complete classpath is a bit tedious. OSGi provides encapsulation for JARs and also has a graph like classpath structure. In addition OSGi modules can be removed, added and updated without any need to shutdown the virtual machine. So it could be a nice addition for many large scale applications but on the other hand you first have to modularize them properly. But maybe I get a chance to try it someday.

 

Introduction to Riak – Chris Molozian

Usually I don’t like product presentation talks but the NoSQL intro the other day got me interested in this topic so I figured I’d give it a try. As expected Chris focused on the key selling features of Riak but who can blame him for that ;-) The ones I found most remarkable are:

• Data is stored in logical buckets using hierarchical structured names for faster lookups and query optimizations
• Patches to the Riak engine can be deployed without downtime
• There are no slave nodes and so you can issue read and write requests to each node
• The interface is HTTP based and thus requires only very loosely coupling to application code

But on the other hand there were also a few drawbacks:

• You have to run at least four nodes in a Riak cluster, recommended would be five
• Conflict merging in case of data inconsistency seemed a bit strange, but maybe I just did not get it
• A deleted record can still be read for a few seconds <- eventual consistency is not for every use case

The talk in general was okay and it seemed that Chris knew what he was talking about while he took on all kinds of questions.

 

Security in the real world – Matt Kilner

Matt gave a nice overview over the latest Java security issues and how they were caused by sometimes minor changes. Like changing the visibility of field in the ToolKit class gave way to the critical security hole of running any native command from a Java class taking advantage of the exploit. Another interesting point was that fixes cannot always be applied easily because the fix would break something else. Details about that can be seen on the slides to this talk and sure are worth a look. At first I had the impression the talk would also cover how application development should take security into account but that was just a misunderstanding of the abstract on my behalf. It was obvious Matt knows his stuff but I hope he gets some more speaking practice in because he did not seem that comfortable or used to speaking in public. Once he gets the hang of that I am confident his talks will become very popular.

 

The Future of Agile – Nigel Runnels-Moss

Oh boy... what can I say… When Nigel announced that he was hijacking this talk to speak about something else I should have just left but for some reason I never learn and always hope for a happy end. Man that was mistake.

Basically this was a “Why managers suck and are responsible for the death of our industry” rant, backed up with diagrams showing data of unknown sources that he drew questionable conclusions from.  Summing it with “this is intentionally provocative” did not help much IMO. Granted some aspects of the talk did make sense but those were rather quotes from books he referenced, e.g. managers are usually bad at what they do because as long as they do well they get promoted until they are above their level competence. But still it seemed as if he just held this talk because he likes to hear himself talking. Which he btw did… very slowly… by always making... pauses after… a few words… as if he was... reading to a child… Well, sorry to say but I just did not like that one, even though others seemed to enjoy it.

 

Summary

As I pointed out at the start of this rather long post, I did enjoy the conference even though there were some issues. Of course not all speakers are world class with a huge list of references and recommendations but that does not necessarily mean they are not good. And even if you get one or two not so good talks… that can happen at any other conference as well but with the cheap ticket price Devoxx offers one of the best values for your money you can find. So go and sign up for  next edition!!

London 2013

When some of my ex-colleagues told me they were going to London this year to visit the Devoxx conference and also spend some time in the city I figured it might be a good idea to join them.  So I talked my boss into paying me the trip to London (at least the conference related stuff) and hooked up with my former co-workers for some cultural sightseeing and enjoying some London pubs ;-)

Fortunately we had some lovely English spring weather, meaning 0-2°C snow and rain plus a chilling wind that tried to rip the flesh from our soaked bodies... man, how I hate that bloody weather over there…

Nevertheless we got to see a few really noteworthy attractions during those days, the first one being the Tower of London. On a few maze like tracks through a few dozens of towers, galleries, halls and chambers you explore the old fortress and get to know some interesting facts about the Tower’s history. Due to the narrow and steep staircases, like you only see them in the Netherlands these days ;-), this trip can be quite a challenge but is still worth it if you are keen on English history, medieval stuff or ancient architecture. Unfortunately a greater part of the tours require you to get outside into the inhabitable area of rain and chill. But as long as you stay inside, e.g. visiting the crown jewels (very impressive stuff) it is rather pleasant. As we just arrived that day, and some of us acted as if they were freezing to death, this was the only sightseeing we did that day.

For dinner we fancied some curry and the hotel staff sent us to “Brick Lane”, it took us some time to figure out that this was not the name of a specific restaurant but instead a street name where you can find a lot of Indian restaurants next to each other. And what happened there was something we have never encountered before. In front of each of those restaurants was a guy advertising rather aggressively for said restaurant, telling us that this was the best place etc. Well, we were there for the food after all so we just took one and went in, after the guy outside promised us a 20% discount on the food. Inside we saw that all tables were full and the place was rather crowded. But before we (a party of 5 people after all) could leave again we were given some drinks and told to wait as there would be a table available soon. And so the ushering began…  A two person table just got free and on the other side of the aisle a three person party seemed to finish their meal. But those two tables could not be connected on the other hand there was a small table next to the three person table where two girls just got their food and were enjoying it. So those two simply got relocated by the staff to the other side of the aisle and suddenly there was enough room for us. To be honest, something like that would get the place shut down very quickly if you tried that in Germany ;-) So we sat down... ordered… and ate the food that was IMO rather tasty. But as soon as we finished our plates were taken away, in some cases in the very same second the cutlery hit the plate (and I am NOT exaggerating here). Well, we paid up and emptied our drinks but we were not quick enough to avoid being asked to leave... politely but nevertheless it was clear they wanted us out as soon as possible… Now that was a first to all of us…

Afterwards we were to meet up with friend of one of my companions who already lives in London for a few years now. He took us to some kind nightclub in the city. As I am not much of a clubbing person that was not my favorite part of the trip ;-) But I learned that people are people no matter if you are in London or Munich or anywhere else… add loud music, enough alcohol and heat and the idiocy emerges ;-) Yes, I know… I am just too cranky about that topic so let’s just move on… When we left the club the tube was already shut so we had to find a bus line taking us back to our hotels (I stayed at a different place than my mates) but that was rather tricky as our guide had not much clue himself about the bus night lines. At least we found a line at Picadilly that took us to my mates’ hotel and I decided to join them and take a cab from their place. So we already saw Picadilly and I had London cab ride… Check ;-)

On the next day we met up at Hyde Park, had a look at Speakers’ Corner and walked south to the Buckingham Palace. Then took a turn through the government quarters looking at Downing Street and then at the Houses of Parliament as well as Westminster Abbey. Too bad it was Sunday, so Westminster was closed for tourists. After crossing the Thames to the Eye of London we walked all the way to the Tate Modern Museum too look at some crazy shit… Yeah right, I am not an art person, congrats for figuring that one out… As that was a very long walk we had, we decided to go back to the hotel and so crossed the Thames again to St. Paul’s via the Millenium Bridge and had another nice bus ride. This time we decided to go for an Italian dinner, which actually was quite nice in a rather classy place. But when it came to the check there was some confusion, the check had a service charge on it (about 12.5%) and as far as we knew that meant that we should not give an additional tip. But our waitress did not look too happy so we just asked and she told us, that this service charge was for the company only but also that it was “okay”… So we all put in some extra for a nice tip, but after some more research on the topic it now seems that the bitch screwed us over. Afterwards we headed for pub next to the hotel and had a nice chatty evening while enjoying funny named beers like “Doom Bar” or “Panzerfaust”, yes that’s right, that is how those English people name beer. The experience of a bar closing down at 11 pm, even though it was expected, was somehow weird though.

Okay, final sightseeing day. We started out at Harrods, holy cow they sell a lot of crap there… It was really impressing seeing such a big and overwhelming shopping mall especially with a lot of luxury stuff. On the top level I found the following item in the sports section, please note the very reasonable price on the sign sitting on the right side of the seabob (okay, looks like you can't zoom in, well the sign says you can buy this nifty toy for the very reasonable price of 80.000 GBP):

After about an hour we headed off to Madame Tussauds to see some wax celebrities and I must say, some of them look _really_ impressive. My favorite of live like look is Sean Connery, that face seemed almost alive. All in all there was quite a lot to see but the “horror show” does not deserve its name and the “Marvel Experience” has just nothing to do with the rest. Even though, the visit was well worth it and I can only recommend it to anyone who has the chance to see it. Afterwards we were considering to try Westminster Abbey again until we found out it had already closed down for that day, darn it! So we did call it a day and headed back to the hotel again. This time our dinner plans took us to a Mexican place that was close to the Italian we were at before, for some reason I could not interest anyone in an English dinner ;-) After a really lovely but rather expensive meal we tried a different pub which was also quite lovely.

The next two days were filled with conference stuff which I will write about in some other post. On the first evening I was at the conference until 10 pm but the others left earlier as the later talks were not interesting for them. So they went back to the pub from the day before but had a not that pleasant experience with a obviously drunk fellow that tried to get them started on “the war, that we lost” etc. When I heard about that I was pretty happy I stayed at the conference ;-) But seriously, is that really something English people need to talk about? Or do you consider it funny to annoy us? Or do you just like to make Nazi references? I really hope that one was an exception… 

On our last evening after the conference ended we went to another Italian place and a pub afterwards near the conference venue. This one got by without any trouble what so ever and was kind of a perfect ending for our trip. 

I must say despite being an awful expensive place to live London seems like a real nice place, at least for  a short vacation even though it seemed to me that an awful lot of litter was laying around everywhere. But the tube took me any place I had to go very reliably and the huge amount of signs and service people everywhere (all way more friendly and helpful than those at home) made it very easy for me as a foreigner to find my way. So I guess I will be back some day to get to see the stuff I missed this time... Beware!!!