Voxxed Days Athens - Recap

After a very successful Voxxed Days Thessaloniki last October, it was now Athens' turn to host the popular event series, and another chance for yours truly to visit the motherland, talk about the interesting stuff we are doing here at JBoss/Red Hat, meet with old friends and make new ones.

Voxxed Days Athens was very well attended with something like 450 participants, numerous sponsors and a great lineup of international and local speakers.

I very much enjoyed the talks of

• Johan Janssen on "the Internet of Lego Trains" - I guess not so much about using Akka Actors, rather mostly about doing stuff with RaspberryPis & Legos.
• Heather Vancura on "the JCP - Java Community Process" - being actively involved with Java EE for the past 15 years, I'm quite familiar with the JCP, but that was the first time I've actually got to meet Heather in person; I guess, it's never too late.
• Dimitris Livas on "Continuous learning of Professionals in an evolving world" - very interesting approach of applying agile development principles not for developing systems but actually developing individuals. I'm keeping a personal note to learn more about it.
• Yours Truly on "Turning your Java EE Monoliths into Microservices using WildFly Swarm"- I very much enjoyed giving the talk and I'd like to thank the populous and lively audience that attended. You can find the slides from my presentation here. 
• Panagiotis Moustafellos on "360 monitoring of your services" - in this distributed cloud-based microservicey world it becomes all the more important to be able to monitor/diagnose/trace the execution and runtime behavior of your services
• Panos Astithas on "Better security and privacy for your web apps" - great security tips from a firefox guru.

and finally

• Douglas Crockford's totally inspiring closing keynote on "Numbers" - the night before I was lucky to sit almost opposite to him at the speaker's dinner in which he was mostly staying quiet; until the moment I started talking about how the Latin Alphabet originated from the Greek Alphabet, which built on top the Phoenician one, which innovated in the sense of transcribing sounds rather than symbols/ideas that was revolutionary for that time and allowed different peoples to use it and express their own native language. Apparently Douglas knows this stuff better than me, which explains to some extend his passion for programming language design. (I hope this doesn't sound Greek to you).

Comparing Voxxed Days Athens & Thessaloniki, I think the latest event felt more organized and especially technical support for the speakers was much better. On the down side, I've attended one talk at the Silk-B room and it was relative small for the number of people that wanted to get in. Also, the cinema format of Devoxx events is probably more preferable when it comes to the size of the rooms and the guaranteed good visibility for all.

Those are just minor considerations for future events, because the team and volunteers behind Voxxed Days Athens did a fantastic job organizing such a high quality event. There is a vibrant community of developers in Athens and events like this provide an excellent opportunity for people to get together, socialize and learn from the best, right there at your doorstep. I can only hope there will be more of that.


See you hopefully soon!

/Dimitris