What is this Devoxx all about?

Aleksandra Puchta-Górska

03 Dec 2012.2 minutes read

Thoughts from SoftwareMill Devoxxians – part 1

It has already become a tradition, that large part of our team takes part in one of the biggest Java conferences in the world – Devoxx. This year Paweł, Adam, TomekSz, TomekD, Jarek, Łukasz and Konrad had fun attending the event and here are their thoughts on the most interesting part of it.

What is this Devoxx all about?

Adam’s thoughts

Devoxx as always was a great conference to catch up on Java and meet old friends. This year’s edition also introduced a new track, Future, which covered talks on hardware, things like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc. The talks in that track were very interesting, and I’m certainly looking for more in the next edition. Embedded software and small, but quite powerful computers certainly is the future, and we’ll be probably seeing a lot of interesting projects coming up.

An interesting thing to note is the absence of Adobe, which was a major sponsor last year. This could be a symptom of the move from Flash to HTML5; which was also visible during the announcement made by Devoxx’s organizer, Stephan Janssen, that Parleys (http://www.parleys.com/) will be reimplemented in HTML5 (previously it was based on Adobe Air).

What is this Devoxx all about?

Paweł’s thoughts

I must admit that this Devoxx was for me more about getting convinced than learning.

I got thrilled by AngularJS demo by Misko Hevery and Igor Minar. Spock won my heart thanks to Andres Almiray’s quick presentation. Frankly, I had heard a lot about awesomeness of those tools, but somehow I had to see them in action on the large screen to start to believe ;)

I notice very positive trend of more and more soft skills topics appearing on conferences aimed to developers, with Devoxx this year being no exception.

I really enjoyed experience report from LMAX from Trisha Gee and Israel Boza Rodriguez. They not only exposed several issues with making agile approach actually work, but shared both successful and failed attempts to address them.

An interesting takeway from John Smart’s talk was to include “in order to” expression in User Story description. Since users tend to express requirements as implementations, our job is to take a step back and analyse business need first.

Finally, Chet Haase’s presentation on software development methodologies was absolutely hilarious… but this was a kind of show one cannot describe in words. A must see indeed, once it is available online.

Last but not least, I really enjoyed the fact that we went to Devoxx in a group. That way I was able to benefit a lot also from the talks that I have not attended (Thanks to Jarek for a lot of patience on reporting takeways from “7 Things” presentation to me :) ).

Those are are the thoughts of just two our Devoxxians.

Stay tuned for the next parts!

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