Devoxx UK 2015 is a mere 22 days away, and it’s packing an eclectic mix of talks for developers in the Java/JVM space to sample. During the CFP window, a total of 443 proposals alone reached the track leads, prompting the team to extend the event by an extra day. Ahead of kickoff, we spoke to some of the dedicated panel of experts who took on the daunting task of sifting through the mountain of submissions and determining the theme of this year’s Devoxx. In this interview, Daniel Bryant, Al Sutton, Richard Warburton, Raoul Urma, and Sven Peters, share some insights into what to expect next month, and just what goes into deciding which talks make the final cut.
Voxxed: There were a lot of great submissions this year – what was your greatest challenge in settling on your track agenda?
Daniel: The biggest challenge with the ‘architecture and security’ track, as with all of the other tracks, was the sheer volume of great submissions we received. This made for some really difficult decisions, and we could have run Devoxx UK as a pure architecture and security conference. Unfortunately the other track leads didn’t like this idea!
Richard: Indeed, we had a difficult time trying to figure out which to accept and which to reject. I don’t think I’ve quite yet faced my biggest challenge. I spoke to a few talk submitters about combining their various deep dive performance talks into a single University Day Session. Unfortunately I need to ensure that these talks fit together well, and I’m delivering one of them. It’s going to be fun!
Al: The greatest challenge was fitting a good balance into the number of talk slots available. Mobile is such a diverse area, and we received proposals for talks in all areas from languages to testing methods and platform specific optimisation methods to cross platform frameworks, so drawing up a short-list was quite a challenge.
Raoul: You often receive several submissions which discuss a similar topic with a different twist or viewpoint. This makes it quite challenging because typically you can only pick one talk per topic to keep a diversified agenda.
Were there common themes that stood out in the submissions in your track?
Daniel: The hot topic at the moment is microservices, and so we received many submissions around this theme. We also received quite a few submissions about architecture (and execution) of systems at scale, which is a theme that is generating a lot of interesting at the moment. With cloud technologies now firmly embedded throughout our industry – from startups to enterprises – developers are getting more experience of designing and maintaining large systems. The rise in popularity of container technology is only serving to make running applications at scale even more accessible, and so naturally a lot of submissions followed this theme.
We also saw quite a lot of submissions focusing on security within the front-end, which was great. The rise in popularity of single page application (SPA) technology, and also the increased maturity of the JavaScript development ecosystem, has meant that front-end work has become attractive for many developers. However, it can be tempting to believe that security is only a back-end concern – and as the likes of OWASP remind us – this is simply not the case. I’m very much looking forward to the session by Carlo Bonamico, who will be diving deeper into ‘web application security reloaded.’
Richard: Yeah, last year on the Java SE track we had a lot of introductions to Java 8 style proposals, since it was the Java 8 release year and several of them were very good. This time round we’ve gone back to basics quite a lot. A number of bytecode talks or performance oriented talks wound their way into the Java SE track. People want to talk about things under the hood this year. In my mind that’s no bad thing.
Sven: There were a lot of submissions around moving to containerized services and the impact on the development and the operation. What does that mean for automated test and manual tests? Code these days have to developed & deployed faster and it seems like we now have good technology in place to do that. A lot of submissions were about how to implement these technology and how to use them effectively within organizations.
Al: The common theme was opportunities for improvement. As developers we sometimes take the easy route or don’t explore a technology to fully understand what it can offer to meet a deadline. The end result is that we don’t always make the best use of what’s available. The talks which have made it into the schedule are the ones that I felt developers could learn the most from. There’s a fair amount of diversity, so there’s plenty of opportunities to learn new things, but there’s also a good amount of depth into subjects that developers haven’t been able to fully explore in the past.
Raoul: Functional programming was a very hot topic. Many submissions proposed to discuss functional programming techniques for various JVM languages. It ranged from teaching how to adopt useful functional patterns to more exotic concepts such as monads. In addition, concurrency on the JVM was also a hot topic. Many talks proposed to shed lights on ideas such as actor-based programming and STM made popular with libraries and features in Scala, Erlang, Groovy and Clojure.
Were there any surprises in this year’s submissions?
Daniel: The rise in popularity of Enterprise architecture submissions somewhat surprised me, as this is often seen as the ‘unglamorous’ (but very important) area of software architecture.
Sven: It was a bit surprising but on the other hand also great to see that testing and code quality is coming back as a topic of interest. That’s why we decided to have two sessions that reflect this: One about modern static code analysis, and the other about the role of testers in a continuous delivery world.
Al: I was surprised at the number of language talks. I’ve mainly stuck to using Java on Android because that’s where the cutting edge tends to be, so I was surprised to see a fair number of submissions offering languages or different approaches which can offer benefits for certain situations.
Raoul: I was delighted to see more conceptual talks submitted to the JVM track. I think it’s important to mix up practical programming talks with more conceptual talks to have an idea of where the programming language ecosystem is heading. Particularly, I’m looking forward to “Miniboxing: Fast Generics for Primitive Types” by Vlad Ureche.
Were there any overarching themes in the track you wanted to embrace this year?
Daniel: Core themes for the architecture and security track this year were ‘past, present and future’. From both the perspectives of security and architecture, I wanted to look at where we’ve come from, where we are now, and where we should be going in order to drive the software development industry forward. In this respect, we’re fortunate to have secured Sarah Saunders to talk about ‘technical archaeology’, Aviran Mordo to discuss the current Wix architecture, and Alex Kosowski to provide a glimpse into the future of the new Java security API, JSR 375.
Richard: I think putting concepts into practice comes through a lot in Java SE this year. Samir Talwar, Benji Weber and Trisha Gee are all doing talks vaguely related to/motivated by Java 8. None of them are the typical “intro to lambdas and streams” type stuff. They’re more about how the big picture fits together – design patterns, real world usage.
Sven: I wanted to reflect the fact that we have the technologies and concepts in place to really do continuous delivery. What we haven’t thought too much about is how this changes testing, collaborating and development processes that we use since years. I also think that a lot of the developer teams still struggle with implementing real continuous delivery. I wanted to give them some tools, methods and stories from leading industry experts to overcome these hurdles.
Al: I wanted to try and show how broad the mobile space has become. We have talks about wearable devices, build systems, UX, and more. I hope that everyone attending will see that their skills have a place in the mobile world, and encourage them to experiment with mobile technologies.
Raoul: There were two main themes that I wanted to embrace this year. First, the JVM platform provides a fantastic programming language ecosystem. It hosts many popular programming languages such as Scala, Groovy, Clojure, which all have different characteristics and interesting features. You also see new ideas pushed in newer programming languages running on the JVM such as Kotlin and Ceylon.
Second, the industry is rapidly adopting functional programming as a solution for producing correct and maintainable software. Most JVM programming languages (now including Java!) support functional features so it is high time to explore what you can do with them.
Given current sector trends in this area, are there skills should people be paying particular attention to?
Daniel: In respects to security, I believe that developers should be embracing the importance of this topic as much as they do with any other good software development practices, such as testing and continuous delivery. Security should rarely be treated as a second-class citizen in software applications, but it often is. With all of the many great resources out on the web, such as the OWASP web site and associated Zed attack proxy (which can be used to test security within development, continuous integration and production), there is no excuse for not knowing and implementing good practices.
In terms of architecture trends, we are also seeing the every-day developer embracing the need for communicating and understanding core architectural principles. The rise in popularity of microservice-based applications, often deployed at scale, is really driving home the need for developers to be able to visualise and comprehend the software system at various levels (or views) of abstraction.
Richard: I think one of the biggest trends that I see is people moving away of large complex Java frameworks, like Java EE and legacy Spring deployments and towards smaller, leaner and simpler systems. Large frameworks have been forced to adapt towards this trend, for example Spring Boot.
Sven: I think it’s always good to look around and see what’s happening outside your own developer life. I would recommend to keep both eyes on microservices and containerized applications. It will be interesting to see how that changes the way we develop, how we work together and if this really leads us to better software for the users.
Al: Mobile use is currently increasing at a phenomenal rate, and it’s easy to get caught up with the latest newly released devices, but this ignores emerging markets where a lot of the devices are a lot less powerful than those you’ll see advertised in stores around London.
I’m hoping people will take what they’ve learnt and look at applying it in an efficient way which will make their apps appeal to a wide range of devices and not just the latest, high-end smartphones. One of the talks in the mobile track specifically deals with lowering power consumption which, for many devices, is a big concern, so if it’s an area people want to explore I’d recommend attending Rick Schwartz’s talk on Friday.
Raoul: The technology industry is really growing very fast at the moment. We see new solutions for building, maintaining and deploying software almost every day. The most important skill is to stay up to date with technical concepts rather than specific implementations because you won’t have time to learn in detail about every new framework and tool that crop ups.
What developments in the sector over the past 12 months are you most excited about?
Daniel: I do keep banging the microservice drum, but I genuinely am excited about this development. I’m seriously hoping that this is service-oriented architecture (SOA) done right, and I’ve personally seen the benefits of breaking down large applications into much smaller and more manageable chunks. Of course, I’m not saying that microservices are a panacea, or are even relevant at all for some projects, but it is great to see that our industry is recognising the historical problem of not being able to comprehend and work efficiently with large software systems.
Richard: Last 12 months? I’m again really tempted to mention lambdas, the move to a more functional Java but I’m beginning to sound like a broken record. I’m also pretty excited that we’re beginning to see a bunch of established concepts from the distributed systems academic community migrate over to the mainstream consciousness. For example CAP theorem and the FLP result.
Sven: I think that software development is not an isolated discipline. It has never been. But with trends like microservices, containerized applications and continuous delivery we can get our software faster to the users. That means we have to work more closely together with operation, QA, product management and service. Feedback loops are getting much shorter. It’s interesting to see how that will change software development.
Al: Smartwatches I think are an exciting development. I don’t think the current generation is going to become the thing that we see on everyone’s wrists, but the idea that we can now explore providing the level of functionality the latest devices offer in a package the size of a watch is the kind of thing science fiction writers were only dreaming about a decade or two ago. Hopefully we’ll see more work being done to allow “smart” functionality to enhance and personalise other everyday objects, like, for example, your ‘phone finding the status of a train you have to catch and displaying it on your fridge when you go to get your breakfast.
Raoul: I’m very excited about how the JVM ecosystem is growing in general. Java is healthy and is given lots of love and attention from Oracle. Alternative programming languages such as Scala are becoming increasingly popular, which provides good balance for the ecosystem.
Which sessions at Devoxx UK are you most eagerly anticipating?
Daniel: Obviously I’m looking forward to all of the talks in the architecture and security track, but I’m also very much looking forward to learning more about upcoming developments in the microservice and container arenas (e.g. by Arun Gupta, Patrick Chanezon and Josh Long), hearing more from the ever-informative Steve Smith in relation to practical continuous deployment, and I’m also keen to hear what Katharine Fitzpatrick has to say about dangerous developers who can’t “stop breaking my stuff”.
Richard: I think Kirk Pepperdine is supposed to be running a performance tuning BoF. He always does interesting sessions. I think Mario Fusco’s concurrency talk will be interesting. I’m also looking forward to the aforementioned deep dive performance university session.
Al: That’s a tough question, because there’s a lot of interesting talks which explore areas I haven’t had a chance to look at. I’m looking forward to learning how to apply my Java skills to writing iOS apps, seeing Mario Fusco’s comparison of concurrency models, and learning more about the areas of Java 8 and J2EE I haven’t explored yet.
Raoul: I’m particularly looking forward to the “Deep-Dive Performance” university session which brings together several world-famous experts in the field. In addition, the conference session “goto java;” by Martin Skarsaune is looking to be a lot a fun. We all love to get our hands dirty with Java bytecode don’t we?
Finally, one for future applicants – what makes you sit up and take notice of a submission?
Daniel: The obvious things, like a concise and obvious title, and a well-written (and grammatically correct) abstract count for a lot. However, don’t underestimate the more subtle things, such as the inclusion of references that acknowledge you are aware of what else is going on within the community in relation to your submission, links to previous presentations you have given and/or articles and Github repos you may have authored, and an explanation of what the audience will take away from seeing your talk.
Richard: A cool sounding talk title! More seriously, whilst that never hurts, I normally try and read each and every abstract on my track and answer two questions. “Would I like to hear this talk?” and “Does the proposer know what they’re talking about?”
Sven: There are a couple of things:
– A title that catches my attention and tells me what the talk is about
– An abstract that describes the problem, gives me examples what the presenter will talk about and the attendees will learn
– A video of the presenter helps me always to see if not only the content is great but also delivery will be entertaining. If you’re a newbie speaker please shoot a video, upload it to YouTube and send us the link to convince the program committee that you’re a great speaker.
Al: This is probably the easiest question to answer: Details.
I take the amount of effort someone puts into their submission as an indication of how much effort they’ll put into their talk. It’s relatively easy to put a few words together and come up with a high level submission without information on what technologies will be covered, but it’s the submissions where the applicants have taken the time to explain what they’ll cover, what technologies they’ll be talking about, and what learning opportunities attendees will have, are the ones that catch my eye.
Raoul: I think there are two ingredients for a great submission. First, a punchy original talk title immediately drags attention! Second, your talk abstract should tell a story: what will the audience learn and how will you guide them there?
If all this sounds like it’s up your alley, there’s still tickets available here – but get in quick to avoid disappointment!
The post What’s Going to Dominate at Devoxx UK? appeared first on Voxxed.