Monday 11 March 2013

Devoxx London 2013, What I'm Excited about on day 1

It's been a while since I last wrote a blog post! A lot has been going on since last years conference tour. The main thing has been the birth of my first child Emily, who is now 2 months old and growing well. As well as that I was promoted at work and have moved into a house in Bedford, what that does is I now have more time to write as I will be spending more of my life on a train.

Sadly, I did not have time to get my act in gear to get a submission in for Devoxx UK, however I have managed to obtain a ticket and am very excited about the event. I plan to write a few blog posts at and about the event as I don't have any talks to prepare. It's an amazing difference to be going to my first technical conference as a delegate, and in this stress free environment I'm excited about what I can learn and contribute to the conference. Conferences have had a positive impact on my career so far. The conversations I had with Sandro Mancuso, Ben Evans, Kirk Pepperdine, Richard Warburton and Martijn Verburg and others have shaped the products that I have been working on and my approach to technology. You simply don't get this from the average day, and you have to come out of your environment and comfort zone to improve your technical skills and appreciate new points of view. If you're in London Devoxx is simple the best opportunity to do this until JAX London in November.

I thought I'd highlight some talks that I'm very interested in that I think will be awesome (this doesn't mean I'm not interested in others, but these I will definitely attend)

55 New Features in Java 8

Looking forward to this one as although I've been involved in a few projects related to SE 8 it will be great to learn what's coming next. After seeing some interesting statistics on Java 7 uptake recently it will be interesting to see how many people make the direct jump from 6 to 8.

Banking, How hard can it be?

The title says it all really, and for anyone that's ever worked in banking I imagine there will be something in this talk that can be related to. I'm specifically interest in how companies are approaching more modern processes and techniques for benefitting their business and the success they have had with this.

Functional is cool, but do you know OO

Sandro is one of my favourite speakers and has had a positive influence to the way I approach problems. Recently I've run several sessions on "Is OO still relevant", so I'm hoping this will challenge my view point and maybe I will learn something about this functional programming business!

Performance Testing Java Applications

I've actually never seen Martin give a full presentation, and its always been in an informal setting I've spoken to him in the past. Often baseline performance of even non performance based systems is something that can easily be overlooked. I'm interested to understand more about how to even begin approaching systems where performance is a key business driver.

Hitting the limits of your hardware with Java

I've spoken to Peter once before at the London Java Community developer sessions and again was amazed to have access to an expert developer. At the time we were talking about ways to improve OpenJDK, some of the ideas and explanations behind his thoughts were excellent.

I think that actually just about confirms my 1st day and the first thing I've noticed is the schedule is quite narrow in terms of choice. However, I'm struggling to pick sessions because there's so many I want to go to. Several conferences I have attended have almost too much choice. The content committee has done an awesome job of making my life difficult. Not being able to chose what to go to is awesome, looking forward to sharing what I'm thinking about day 2 shortly.

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