Another Devoxx has come and gone and it’s time to reflect on what was seen and loved!
There were loads of amazing talks this year: Some new technologies, friendly faces and some wildly futuristic technology that makes it seem like we’re living in a cool Cyberpunk world - though, not a Blade Runner-type one.
Information Storage in DNA by Nick Goldman
Now this is what living in the future feels like! Nick guided us through his journey of using DNA (yes, those double-helix strands that are in our cells) to store data.
Unfortunately, we’re not talking about superfast SSD-like speeds, but this could be a long-term storage solution that the world is starting to really need.
Performance tuning Twitter services with Graal and Machine Learning by Chris Thalinger
Before seeing this talk, I was taking Graal to be this weird native-Java thing that Oracle was pushing, possibly to gain PR points or just make money. HOWEVER, after coming away from this talk, Graal is now near the top of my list on things that I wanted to go implement in my Java projects. The sheer speed and performance improvements displayed here were beyond cool!
Quarkus and GraalVM: booting Hibernate at supersonic speed, subatomic size by Sanne Grinovero
Quarkus was something on the edge of my tech perception (though certainly not the case for my colleague Chris Burns who wrote a fantastic article on this very blog a couple of weeks ago!).
Watch this talk to hear about a very cool piece of tech that is going to help make your applications and containers function at hyper-speed:
How can Serverless improve your Horticulture by Joao Veiga & Clive Hackney
Our very own Capgemini engineers, Joao & Clive, gave a really interesting talk about a Hackathon a few members of the Open Source Cloud Engineering (OSCE) team, here at Capgemini, did a little while ago.
In this, Joao and Clive dive deep into how they leveraged Platform.IO, AWS IoT, Serverless, Graal, Pulumi and a handful of ESP-32 micro-controllers to create a greenhouse full of technology that also sits inline with Capgemini’s values on Sustainability & Corporate Social Responsibility.
(You can even see me arrive late @13:42).
Integration Testing with Docker and Testcontainers by Kevin Wittek
OH BOY, did I love this talk. Kevin’s enthusiasm around this bit of technology is joyous to watch (and the tech itself is darn cool too!).
Testcontainers is basically a library that you can import into your project so that you can easily use Docker containers in your integration tests. That’s right, no more Mocks, Stubs, In-memory Databases that you have to keep stable and fight with - instead, just write a little code that boots the software you need into a container, before you run your tests.
I’ve never been more excited to write tests!
Dev Culture Hacking & Org Refactoring - Transformation tips from Software Pros by Andrew Harmel-Law
Andrew is one of our alumni, and it’s awesome to see him continue to thrive. Here he talks about some of the lessons he learned when trying to do, what he dubs as, “Organisation Refactoring”.
It’s super interesting to watch, and definitely gave everyone who watched it something to take away:
Cool things to do with Alexa (and a lot of things you can’t) by Sarah Saunders
Sarah is another one of Capgemini’s finest and gave this great talk on her experimentations with Alexa and AI for Sentiment-Analysis to create a personality test, based on the OEJTS - a community version of the Myers-Briggs personality test.
Look out for me @14:00 as I volunteer to actually take a short test!
Busy Developer’s Guide to Go by Ted Neward
I went along to this talk with my colleague Clive, who recommended that I go witness the amazing Ted Neward give a talk.
I didn’t really need much persuasion as Go is a language I’ve been meaning to get my hands dirty with for a long time but I’ve been too busy to do so.
Well, this was the perfect talk for me as Ted does a great job of breaking down the complexities and subtleties of Go, even for a JavaScript developer like me 😂.
Agile is a Dirty Word by James Birnie
I didn’t actually go to this one in-person, but my colleague Sam Taylor did and thought it was excellent.
As someone who is very fond of ripping out the buzzwords and toxic jargon from our development practices, I have to say: This talk is really quite good.
MOAR IntelliJ IDEA Tips and Tricks by Trisha Gee
This one is an easy sell: If you’re an Intellij user and you want to be a super-speedy developer who knows all the cool tricks to getting the most out of your favourite Jetbrains IDE, you HAVE to watch this talk. Trisha is a great speaker and just gives more evidence as to why Jetbrains are doing some really cool things.
The 7 Deadly Sins of API Design by Luis Weir
Inspired by the film Se7en, Luis Weir (ANOTHER Capgemini Alumni) gives a really interesting and insightful talk into what you really need to avoid doing when designing an API. A must watch for any of you budding Architects out there!
The Capgemini Booth!
How could I not mention our booth?
We were a tremendous success this year and garnered a lot of attention (not just from our cool t-shirts, beer and ice cream machine!).
As featured above in Clive & Joao’s talk about using Serverless to improve your Horticulture, we also had our IoT Greenhouse which a few colleagues of mine in the Open Source Cloud Engineering (OSCE) Team built at a Hackathon. It was great to see people interacting with the IoT devices, such as applying heat to the heat sensor to watch the Greenhouse window be opened by one of the actuators.
We even had some senior Capgemini folks turn up in the form of Martin Scott (Director of our Custom Software Development (CSD) business unit), on Thursday, and Paul Margetts (UK Managing Director), on Friday.
We had some great chats with them and they got to see the real impact that Capgemini is having with the engineering community - something we only want to further improve upon!
So thanks to everyone who came to our booth to meet us, and special thanks to everyone on the team who turned up and made great (eco-friendly) footprint at Devoxx 2019.
Thanks Team!
Not included in the picture, but equal thanks to:
Martin Scott, Clive Hackney, Sara Matthewman, Stuart Willams, Elliot Berg, and Me!
Final note
I won a drone! :3
