2014 saw my first participation in JEEConf (Kiev, Ukrain) as well as my farthest travel East so far. I’m so glad I could attend! As a speaker, I was not only shown Kiev during a guided tour, I also had the privilege to attend a true traditional Ukrainian banya (bath), complete with wet leaves, cold water and full head-to-toe scrubbing. I do not know if there’s a tradition of Ukrainian hospitality, but if there’s one, it was more than upheld! As conferences go, I was also very happy to meet new people from all over the world.
Apart from these nice asides, I also followed the following sessions:
- Easy Distributed Systems using Hazelcast by Peter Veentjer
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A presentation of Hazelcast, an in-memory data grid. This presentation was focused on Hazelcast main capabilities and usage: caching and clustering using distributed data structures. The format was especially interesting, as the speaker used small shell scripts showing examples of the capability just presented. As I attended a presentation about Hazlecast more than one year ago, this presentation served as a nice refresher for me.
- Mobile functional testing with Arquillian Droidium by Stefan Miklosovic
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Given I’ve currently writing Integration Testing from the Trenches, I admit I was expecting much from this talk since Integration Testing and End-to-end Testing are somehow related. I learned new tools related to end-to-end testing on mobile I didn’t know of previously, but to be frank, 50 minutes were too long for the information provided: I could have learned the same amount of information in a blog post much quicker. I don’t know if this feeling comes from my high expectations or the speaker’s performance, but the fact is we didn’t met.
- Holding down your Technical Debt with SonarQube by Patroklos Papapetrou
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I think I know SonarQube very well as I’m an early adopter, but I attended this talk nonetheless because I wanted to Patroklos Papapetrou’s performance first-hand. I was not disappointed: not only does he know the subject deeply, he’s also a very good presenter of Code Quality Analysis in general and SonarQube in particular. Icing on the cake, it appears we share opinions on the subject though we never me before nor talked about that. Highly recommended talk to attend to!
- Reflection Madness by Heinz Kabutz
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A list of reflection tricks, this talk’s conclusion was not to use it unless really really (really!) required, as it can lead to doing stuff that cross the boundaries of the langage (e.g. adding a new enum value at runtime). It must have been a very interesting presentation, but at this point, the banya of the day before had worn me out and I confess I slept for most of the talk.
I also had the privilege of presenting two talks myself:
I think both received a warm welcome from the audience, but I cannot be the judge of that, of course.
JEEConf is really a one of a kind conference. For example, one of the sponsor had the crazy idea to bring a live racoon (though I wouldn’t have dared kiss it like the guy: the trainer had numerous bite marks on his hands). This is something highly unusual in tech conference! I enjoyed the 2014 edition I really hope to join JEEConf 2015: since the date is already set to May 22-23, you know what to do if you want it too!
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Now I have this song playing in my head endlessly - bonus points for a good translation (Google Translate is not a good one) |