What’s the crack jack?
I had the opportunity to be at Devoxx Belgium 2022, the conference was held from October 10th until October 15th in Antwerp – Belgium. It was amazing. It’s a big event with lots of people, the most trending and famous people around Java were there, including James Gosling.
It was my first time attending such an event and hopefully not the last. I could grab a lot of information and learn a lot in a very short period. There is something truly different between watching talks or courses at home and being there live.
The technical deep dive sessions took place on the first days of the week whereas the conference sessions were spread throughout the rest of the week. Especially for senior developers, the deep dives are of great value since they cover a lot of advanced topics which help you push further in your development career.
The conference was held inside a movie theatre.
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I was invited by Rafael Del Nero to share the talk with him, and because of my focus on Virtual Threads, I ended up adding some code challenges to Virtual Threads and Structured Concurrency.
Video 01: Duke’s Star Trek with Java 18 Code Challenges by Rafael del Nero , Igor De Souza
It was an amazing experience and I was surprised to see a lot of people there because our talk was at the same time as the James Gosling one.
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Devoxx is a developer’s community conference series created in 2001 by Stephan Janssen, organised by the Belgian Java User Group. The conference takes place every year in Antwerp Belgium around September.
Devoxx Belgium is a 5-day conference where developers and architects come together and explore the latest technology advancements and fascinating ideas, with some of the most inspiring speakers in our sector.
The sponsors built up their booths on Monday afternoon so they were ready and steady for anyone to visit them from Tuesday onwards. Yes, I manage to get a lot of swag.
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James Gosling was there as well and he gave a talk about Raspberry Pi.
Video 02: IoT in the Trenches, at Scale by James Gosling
I followed a lot of talks and dive sessions and I managed to learn a lot. It was an incredible experience. For me, it was nice to see how Virtual thread is a trending topic and how people are curious to see what this will become. Other topics that I saw were Streaming Data and microservices patterns.
I want to point out three talks here;
Video 03: Threading lightly with Kotlin by Vasco Veloso
This talk is not Virtual Thread but Coroutines. People often mix up “parallel” and “concurrent”. Concurrent tasks use the same processor while parallel ones use multiple processors (CPUs), Vasco gives a nice explanation about some concepts around coroutines.
Video 04: GraalVM Cloud Native & Micronaut Deep Dive by Graeme Rocher
I am kind of a fan of Micronaut and Graeme Rocher. In this talk, he explained a lot of things about Micronaut. One thing that I learned and want to test is JTE as a View. I will do some Raspberry things soon.
Video 05: Spring + Kotlin = Modern + Reactive + Productive by James Ward , Josh Long
This talk will walk through how Spring & Kotlin fit together with coroutines, R2DBC, Testcontainers, and Kotlin/JS for the web UI. Come for Kotlin, stay for the ASCII art.
I managed to meet a lot of people for the first time in person.
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One of the keynote presentations was a lot of fun and I recommend you watch this talk even if you are not developer related.
Video 06: The Art of Code by Dylan Beattie
There is more to a Java conference than technical sessions. So almost every day the attendees and some speakers are in a local pub to sample Belgian beers.
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Brussels and Antwerp are nice cities and there are a lot of things to do there, but of course, a test of a nice Bear, waffles, and Fries cones are kind of obligatory.
All of the talks from all paths become available online after the conference. Make sure to check it out on the Devoxx Youtube channel.
The week of 10 – 15 October was packed with great talks and inspiring people. I got to know a lot more about the latest and greatest trends and technologies from their ecosystem. Next year, it will be the 20th edition of Devoxx, so that leaves me curious to guess what it will be.
Links
https://www.youtube.com/c/Devoxx2015/videos
https://www.flickr.com/photos/bejug/albums/72177720303027621