What is this Devoxx all about? Part 3

Aleksandra Puchta-Górska

14 Dec 2012.3 minutes read

Finally, time came for the third and last part of our team’s coverage of Devoxx 2012.

This time ŁukaszL and Konrad share their thoughts.

ŁukaszL

It was my third Devoxx and all I can say it was the best one, but not in case of talks – they are always average at the end – but in case of socialise I met old friends from OSS world that I know just from mailing lists, it’s always good to meet in real, grab few beers and talk. I love the idea about traditional OSS dinner which happening each year during Devoxx – it isn’t connected with Devoxx, it’s just an external initiative of people involved in OSS. And the gran finale at Charleroi, in Taverne Sainte Barbe with teammates from SotwareMill was the best evening ever – delicious beers, huge and astonish t-bone steak and the barman – you must be there to understand

Let’s back to Devoxx. At the first day, Wednesday, I really enjoyed Hadi Hariri’s talk – Developers – Prima Donnas of the 21st Century – it was funny, it was interesting, and all of all I must admit Hadi is right – we’re a prima donnas. If you will have a chance to see Hadi on stage, please do it and try to understand his message. That day there was also a great talk about Scala – Effective Scala by Joshua Suereth. As a new player in Scala world I was a bit scared at the beginning that I don’t get his point, but at the end I learnt alot from the talk. And I’m planning to buy his book Scala in Depth to learn even more

The second day started with the biggest disappointment ever – talk Effective Dependency Injection by Googlers – it was like siting on a conference in early 2000s, where statements like use constructor injection and not setter injection was like word of a god, like a new brilliant idea – but not at this time. I was really, really disgusted : Anyway, I think there is still hope for Google, which was proved by Igor Minar and Misko Hevery’s talk about AngularJS – Re-imagining the browser with AngularJS – funny, concrete, step by step presentation how fast (with few shortcuts ) you can build AngularJS based modern webapp. You can feel almost the same joy by watching this movie – WebStorm 5.0 – Live Edit with Google Chrome.

The last day, Friday is always an easy day – everybody is tired (maybe because of party at Noxx ) and it’s just a half of day, the conference ends around 1 PM. Anyway I decided to enter Adam Bien’s talk – Real World Java EE – I love to hear Adam, his jokes, his simple straightforward answers, his attitude is splendid. It was great talk at the end of Devoxx.

See you there next year!

What is this Devoxx all about? Part 3

Konrad

While I found Devoxx just as good as I expected, the thing that made it unique for me was the sheer number of speakers or attendees I either already knew in person, always wanted to meet in person, or met the first time and found them to be really awesome. So the best thing about the conference was what happened between the sessions – long chats about software, organising conferences and having a chance to talk with people etc. Similarly the same can be said about the JUG Leaders BOF or GDG meetup – which is yet another thing unique at Devoxx.

From the technical side I was really happy to see so much Scala on stage – seems that the language is getting a bit more mainstream finally, although it still has it’s niche I’d say. Another nice thing was that many Googlers were presenting – which usually doesn’t happen that often at one place at not-Google organised events. Some presentations were really awesome, they really do know their stuff, yet others reminded me that even in big G – people are just people, nothing more and nothing less.

It was also a good time to meetup with the rest of the SoftwareMill – so I really enjoyed the few days we had together, even if running around between sessions or bars in the evenings.

We were happy to share our insights about one of the biggest Java conferences. Hope to see you there next year!

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