Devoxx 2014 - Day 2

17 Apr 2014

Day 2 at Devoxx, switching to English. With a brand new blog site hosted on Github. The longest part was finding a theme I'm happy with.

Keynotes

We (developers) are stars. We are the future. We should embrace it.

The expected message for such a conference. There's a data revolution, lines move, fast, and we should be part of it.

I appreciated the last surprise speaker Tariq Krim, famous for his recent report, and who is trying to move some lines, promoting the role of the developer in the future. Check the Cast codeurs podcast (in French) to learn more.

His vision is not as positive as the one of the preceding speakers, who were talking about endless opportunities in an evolving world. I liked his ideas on government's poor use of technology and lack of technical leadership, probably related to political leaders' lack of technical knowledge.

By replacing jobs, technology may also increase the social gaps in our societies.

When I hear Big Data, I also hear Big Brother

Conferences

Gradle

Maven bashing (using Comic Sans in the slides), delivered with a little aggressivity. Some convincing points, acknowledged by the Maven crowd in the audience. The irony is that, after all this bashing, his demos started failing. That's when I left the room.

Programer - JL de Morlhon

Proud of being called a Programer (Developer is more general). The programer is now at the center of the process, able to 'replace' all the jobs, with the app store myths of the one-man success story.

But there's a gap to bridge. The programer should indeed have a broader culture, to be able to talk with others and hence become more central. Similarly, the others should learn the basics of programming, to understand this job.

A message similar and complimentary to the one of the morning keynotes, with an entertaining speaker.

Angular dirty code

A list of recipes to better maintain the code for Angular addicts. A lot of common sense, but always good to recall. Unfortunately, no easy message to take away from this list unless you took notes since the slides are pretty empty. The shy speaker with his scripted jokes didn't help.

Reactive Angular

Remembering Martin Odersky's reactive programming coursera course. Stream processing, maps and immutable state. Applied to Angular using the RX framework. The resulting code is indeed well decomposed, avoiding callback hell, with a clean and unique failure handler. I wonder how this could be applied to more real life applications though.

The Docker revolution

There's indeed a huge buzz around this pretty new technology. Since I discovered it recently, I wanted to know more, as a lot of other people judging by how packed the room was. Docker is filling an empty space, providing a way to efficiently package and deploy an application. The Java promise of the write once deploy everywhere finally made true. It has become the de facto standard, with big names joining the ship to shape the product.

Code story

Similar to the labs I did the previous day.