Devoxx 2016

It was this time of year again. Devoxx’ 15th edition. Being busy with Big Data related topics in the past few years I skipped this java oriented conference the last few years favour of more Hadoop and Spark focussed conferences. having left some room in my conference budget this year I decided to go visit it once more this special edition together with my colleague Ron. The program even had a Big Data track so there should be enough for me to learn and discover.

Feels like coming home

Arriving at the kinepolis venue in Antwerp felt a bit like coming home. The large cinema rooms had enough place and offered comfortable seats to the 3500 attendees and I saw a lot of familiar faces in the audience.

Day 1: More Machine Learning

The conference started with a rather lengthy keynote session in which my personal favorite was the talk by Cliff Click: “Everything your mother should know about compilers”. The rest of the day my choices fluctuated between Java Rest (with Spring) and a few talks with more machine learning in the title then in the talk itself. I think my day to day exposure to Machine Learning has spoiled me a bit so forgive me my blunt statement.
Best talk of the day was the talk by Roy van Rijn: “how Google Deepmind conquered the game of Go” and I finished the day with Sam Brannen: “Deep Dive into Unit 5”.
Jpoint hosted their famous BierEvent in cafe Bier Central. Since this was next to my hotel it was a small effort to rejoice them with my presence. Good talks with nice people.

Day 2: Streaming apps and data in the cloud

The second conference day started with morning sessions from streaming applications in the cloud and streaming data from formula1 simulations. During the lunch break Xebia colleague Constantijn Visinescu had a 15 minute talk about “NoOps in the cloud” and the afternoon sessions I attended largely where about the Google Cloud platform and their Tensorflow, Vision and Speech api’s

Beyond Java

Overall thoughts about the conference are: A well organised conference with a broader view then only Java. A bit light on the Big Data track for me, but learned a few new things on the Java ecosystem that will help me connect the Big Data Ecosystem tools with the Java landscape in the enterprises we work with. I will keep a close eye on next years schedule to see if I can attend again.