Java Barcelona Conference 2016

A week ago the second edition of the Java Barcelona Conference took of in the catalan capital. With an ambitious schedule of 8 workshops and about 50 talks, spread over four different tracks over three days, a weekend with a lot of Java and JVM-related knowledge-sharing began. The conference attracted about 300 developers who met up at the facilities of the University Pompeu Fabra. As I was there to speak about Reactive Java EE I had the opportunity to experience the conference both as a participant and as a speaker.

At thursday evening the speakers dinner was held at the sport harbour of Barcelona. The organizers Barcelona JUG did an excellent work in welcoming us to their city and with a great view, great tapas and with even greater company the speakers shared a really pleasant evening. It was a true privelege to meet passionate people with the JVM as the common denominator!

The view from the speakers dinner

Looking at the trends over the coming speeches Microservices still kept popping up everywhere as they have for some time now. What could be seen was that a lot of the talks incorporated MSA with many surrounding tools and capabilities of (especially) docker, Kubernetes or strategies of e.g. how to deal with deploying your microservices.

Another trend that could be seen on the test-track was that there were a lot of presentations about Spock, a test framework with a really expressive DSL and a lot of other very useful utilities. Spock had gone under my radar before this conference so it was a really pleasant surprise to get a bit of a crash course in the framework. However, the session that had caught my eye the most was the Epic Battle: Zombies vs Mutans by Tomasz Dubikowski. Tomasz took the audience through a very humouristic session about Mutation testing using PITest. With a very valid case about how we often care about the quality of our code but seldom the quality of our tests the session was a homerun! PITest is definetely something I’d recommend everyone to at least try out, and hopefully introduce into their everyday workflow.

During the saturday I got on stage just before noon. This had given me some time to sort out most of the confusion with my name which many of the spanish people found quite hilarious :) With the quote “You can’t spell show without ‘show’” I started of my presentation with some live coding which I thankfully got through without any major incidents. The feedback seems to have been really good on my presentation as I by the end of the conference was voted as the fourth most appreciated speaker by the audience. Yey! \o/

As the conference is not that big (yet) it held a really nice and cozy atmosphere and I had the opportunity to meet a lot of nice participants, speakers and organizers. Even though there were some technical issues in the beginning of the conference it was all sorted out and I believe that every visitor of the conference had a really good feeling of satisfaction when the conference was ended with the keynote “The OpenSource way - what, why and how”. I’ll have to give a lot of credit to the Barcelona JUG who did amazing work in putting this all together.

To summarize: Meeting great people at a great cozy conference in a great city :)

Over and out

Ola