Conference action - from Soft-Shake in Geneva to Devoxx in Antwerp

Fall is a busy conference period and parallel to our team's ambitious WildFly and JBoss EAP release goals I always try to squeeze in a few days into my schedule for opensource advocation and meeting with our communities.

So the week before I've had the pleasure of presenting on WildFly Swarm at Soft-Shake'17 in Geneva. It's a short 1.5h ride with the train from Neuchâtel so it feels pretty much local: you can get there, present and be back for dinner. And it's also very much francophone, although, they do accept talks in English.

If you don't know about WildFly Swarm, our sister project to WildFly, I suggest you check it out. Especially if you come from the Java EE direction, WildFly Swarm facilitates the transition to developing Microservices and Cloud Native applications. It also implements the Eclipse Microprofile specification.

The latest published spec for Microprofile is version 1.2 and you can get a very nice introduction about what it includes here.  If you want to try out Microprofile v1.2 on Wildfly Swarm check out this Tech Preview.

Now within less than 12 hours I should be on my way to the annual Devoxx.be pilgrimage.

• If you are around on Monday evening, come over to the WildFly Community BOF at 20:30. It's been an exciting year for Java EE, with the release of Java EE 8 and the announcement of the move of Java EE to the Eclipse foundation under the Eclipse Enterprise for Java project (EE4J). Coupled with the fast paced Microprofile releases and the Microprofile effort also moving to Eclipse, and we have a very different landscape carved up for Java EE going forward. So do come to this BOF to discuss the latest developments and how they are affecting the WildFly community projects. I will be co-hosting this with Edson Yanaga, Director of Developer Experience at Red Hat who also has a deep-dive session in the morning.
• Then on Thursday evening I am participating at the Opening Up of Java EE panel discussion (room 6, 17:50) hosted by David Delabassee alongside distinguished members of the Java EE community, Mike Croft, Ivar Grimstad, Martijn Verburg and Steve Poole. If you are interested in the future of Java EE and it's re-incarnation as a completely open Eclipse project, this is the place to be.

See you all very soon at Devoxx in Antwerp!

/Dimitris

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

Voxxed Thessaloniki - Recap

It's been a few days since the successful completion of the Voxxed Days conference that took place in the beautiful and historic city of Thessaloniki. Here's a quick recap.

I've had presented at a Voxxed event before,  but this time the conference had special interest for me not only because it was the first time the VoxxedDays series of events is coming to Greece, but also because I was eager to meet with the active scene of the local developer community of what we use to call the the co-capital.

The event which included three tracks was organized at the Village Cinemas Multiplex, following the very successful Devoxx format. There was an impressive lineup of 17 international speakers that attracted some 350 attendees from 11 countries. Those are impressive numbers for a first time conference.

I pretty much stayed on the Java/DevOps track, mostly centered around the theme of Microservices and CI/CD environments. My talk on WildFly and WildFly Swarm, our new toolkit for creating microservices on top of the robust WildFly runtime using best of breed Java EE and thirdparty components was also in that track. I've had great discussions on the subject with a large number of folks after the talk and during the beer session that followed the event. If you are interested to find out more you can find my slides here.

I've enjoyed the opening and closing keynotes on JDK9/Modules and Developer Careers respectively and I heard good comments about the other two Methodology/BigData and Web Development tracks.

I've also had the privilege to participate at the 8th Episode of the Devastation podcast talking about WildFly, Application Servers and Opensource software development. If you are an aspiring developer that wants to enter the magical world of opensource, I have some very practical advice for you in the podcast (as long as you understand Greek, that is).

I need to congratulate the guys at the organization and the large numbers of volunteers that helped pull this off. You guys did a magnificent job organizing a world class event, Bravo!

The problem is that you've raised the bar for subsequent events - we want more! And more we will get because VoxxedDays will be moving to Athens the coming May, so I'm looking forward to that.

Until the next time!
/Dimitris

PS
If you want to read more about VoxxedDaysThessaloniki, check out those links, too:

• Patroklos - A dream come true
• Paris - Quick Recap
• Spyros' - Impressions
• 126Kr
• Twitter #vdthess