This year’s Devoxx has started in a “Micheal Bay movie style” ie. with a big bang. The keynote was very entertaining thanks to James Veitch and his “Dot Con” talk. In this keynote he showed how he turns some of the most annoying scamming emails against its authors by twisting what they say, following incorrectly their instructions or even trying to “trick” them into sending him a new toaster.
Ted Neward and his “Guide to hacking Java” was a talk not for the faint hearted. He did a really good job by both interacting with the audience by letting people to actually choose what they wanted to hear about. Ted kept everyone interested till the last minute of his speech. If you really like to raise the JVM bonnet and get dirty you should have been there. Some of the things you could get familiar with were: JNI, how to create your own launcher, how actually libraries like Lombok work or learn a bit about Java Agents and debugging APIs.
Getting pointed with fingers because you still use WebSphere? Guys from the second floor making jokes about you because you’re still using Grunt? Matt Raible has a cure for that. During his talk on JHipster he showed how to stay cool and fresh in the sophisticated world of frameworks, tools, libraries. In his talk he gave an intro to JHipster and its capabilities. Matt created a simple application with auth, AngularJS, Gatling tests, UML diagrams and deployed everything to the cloud. In the meantime he could sip his favourite whisky and beer (not sure if it was the best mix though).
Christopher Batey usually has a lot of practical knowledge to share. The title “Jvm and Docker, a good idea?” didn’t seem like a big novelty. Fortunately Chris pointed a lot of topics during optimization of containers running a JVM, like: cgroups, namespaces, measuring and limiting resource usage etc. He suggested a few interesting tools which show what’s happening inside your containers:
For me the most exciting part was when Christopher discussed how to run applications which use a limited number of threads. He gave an example of using Ratpack which in many concepts is very similar to Vert.x which I use currently for building microservices. Can’t wait to play with all the tools at work.
Last day of Devoxx ended with a set of workshops. It was a pleasure to take part in the organised workshops, although many participants did not have pre-installed software and were of ranging capabilities so sometimes the pace seemed to slow for some of the people.
It was really good to see that the London Java community is so active! Devoxx gave me this year a lot of ideas and motivation, this is why I love conferences so much!