Devoxx 2023 (Athens)
Initially, I was skeptical. In the age of Covid, do people even attend conferences anymore? With free educational content on YouTube and virtual conferences on Zoom, what’s the point? Despite my doubts, I found myself driving to Athens to participate in Devoxx 2023. Devoxx Greece is a three-day event where developer communities gather to discover the latest technological advancements, presented by some of the most inspiring speakers in the industry. The Devoxx family, which includes Belgium, France, UK, Poland, Marocco, and Ukraine, welcomes over 15,000 Devoxxians annually!
To my surprise, the conference was exceptionally well-organized, and the turnout was impressive. Four large rooms were filled with enthusiastic attendees, eager to absorb the knowledge shared in each session. The talks were organized into the following tracks: Architecture, Containers & Infrastructure, Data & AI, Development Practices, Java, UI & UX, Programming Languages, and Security. In this post, I will share my impressions and key takeaways from the talks I attended.
But first some pictures from the venue and the event.
Talks
Let’s see some of the main points for the talks that I had attended and enjoyed :-)
1. Keynote: Managers are from Mars, Developers are from Venus by TED NEWARD
Ted aimed to bridge the gap between developers and managers in his well-prepared talk, which was filled with numerous real-life examples from his own experiences. The presentation focused on the key responsibilities of managers, such as assembling strong teams rather than just hiring star programmers, fostering an environment that helps developers achieve a state of flow, minimizing disruptions by reducing unnecessary meetings, and even making tough decisions like relocating or dismissing individuals who negatively impact team dynamics.
2. The Current State of AI-Driven Development by Natalie Pistunovic
Natalie, a Community Ambassador for OpenAI, showcased the latest advancements in AI, specifically focusing on transformers. One notable takeaway from her presentation was the introduction of Phind, an impressive AI-powered search engine designed for developers. This innovative tool not only cites sources but also automatically generates follow-up questions, among other features.
3. Developing a stream processing application with Apache Kafka and Quarkus by Ozan Günalp
Apache Kafka has become the go-to standard for high-performance data streaming applications. Such applications are rarely focused solely on message processing; they often need to integrate Kafka messages with remote endpoints, store messages in a datastore, or relay them to third-party services.
Ozan from Red Hat showcased how Quarkus, combined with MicroProfile Reactive Messaging, can be used to build Kafka-based event-driven architectures. Quarkus is a cloud-native, (Linux) container-first framework designed for creating Java applications. Using a sample application, Ozan demonstrated the key concepts and common patterns, illustrating how Quarkus simplifies the development of event-driven microservices and integrates seamlessly with Quarkus’ reactive core.
4. Browsers are the new containers! by Dan Erez
What an incredible talk! Dan delved into a fascinating concept: leveraging the untapped potential of a company’s computers by running tasks in Chrome tabs. Each tab functions as an isolated environment and boasts a robust API. So, why not utilize the browsers within an organization to act as containers for running workloads, ultimately saving money on servers? I’m eager to get my hands on the source code he demonstrated!
5. Using ChatGTP for technical & nontechnical presentations by Eliza Camper
Eliza from Amity showed how she can effectively create with the help of Generative models technical (code) and nontechnical presentations with a clear structure, slides with bullet points, images, and or even videos.
6. Resumability in the next generation frontend framework With O(1) loading time by Jane Cabagnot
Jane introduced us to Qwik, a novel JavaScript framework that employs a unique rendering paradigm called “resumability.” This approach allows a JavaScript app to be serialized into HTML, thus eliminating the need for the hydration technique commonly used in meta-frameworks like Next.js. Qwik enables the creation of “resumable apps” that require minimal JavaScript for interactivity and employ fine-grained lazy loading to load only the necessary components. Jane’s talk provided guidance on getting started with Qwik.
The key points covered in her presentation included: understanding the Qwik framework, comparing Qwik to React and Angular, strategies for reducing the size of JS bundles, and a tutorial on building with Qwik. The presentation piqued my interest, and I’m eager to give Qwik a try.
7. Empowering Teams with Terraform and OPA: Best Practices for Secure Infrastructure as Code by DIONYSIS TSOUMAS
Dionysis, the Director of DevOps at GWI, showed us OPA: Open Policy Agent, which makes it possible to write policies that test the changes Terraform is about to make before it makes them. Also, he combined OPA with another open-source tool called infracost that calculates the cost of a terraform plan. This way he can also test and limit the cost of a terraform plan before actually applying it. Nice ideas for our DevOps!
8. The Data Lakhouse for Streaming Data — A talk for everyone who ❤️ data by Frank Munz
Frank, a principal at Databricks, delivered a lively and engaging presentation on Data Lakehouse, a new platform from Databricks that blends the best features of data lakes and data warehouses. This innovative approach provides the reliability, robust governance, and performance associated with data warehouses, while also offering the openness, flexibility, and machine learning support characteristic of data lakes. Essentially, data is stored at the S3 level, but ACID transactions can be performed on top of it. An important takeaway from the presentation was that the term “real-time pipelines” may be somewhat misleading, as there is always a slight latency. Additionally, Frank introduced the appealing concept of continuously ingesting all data and replacing traditional ELT pipelines with streaming pipelines — truly cutting-edge ideas!
9. Cognitive UX — Using cognitive science and psychology to drive UX design by EMILIA CIARDI
Emilia, a software engineer specializing in mobile gaming technologies, shared insights from psychology and cognitive sciences to illustrate how their application can lead to more effective user experiences, both positively and negatively.
Key topics covered in her presentation included dual process theory, heuristics, the illusory truth effect, the paradox of choice, priming, and inadvertent priming, among others.
(Note to myself from the talk: The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over other from William James)
10. Move fast Build things… Safely! by MOHAMMED ABOULLAITE from Spotify
In his presentation, Mohammed, an avid Formula 1 enthusiast, explored how we can make our code deployments as secure as Formula 1 races. Drawing from various principles employed in F1, he demonstrated how we can learn from and adopt these concepts in the way we design, structure, deliver, and safeguard our systems.
The talk covered:
+ Importance of having a trusted and adversarial CI/CD pipeline
+ Security patterns: Least privileged principal, defence in depth, Zero trust
+ Resiliency patterns: Micro-segmentation, Anti-overload patterns
+ Monitoring and alerting
11. Purposeful Personal Branding by CASSANDRA FARIS
In Cassandra’s presentation, she offered a wealth of both theoretical and practical guidance on leveraging social media, podcasting, and YouTube to establish a meaningful personal brand that not only benefits one’s career but also contributes to the community. These platforms have evolved from simply being enjoyable ways to share our lives and connect with others to becoming essential tools for networking and career advancement. During the talk, attendees heard about individuals whose personal brands played a key role in their success as esteemed developers, managers, and community leaders. Participants learned how to utilize their online presence for career growth and received valuable insights on best practices, common pitfalls, and strategies for striking a balance between professional and personal content.
12. Chaos Engineering for people, how we “resilienced” our incident response team by Christodoulos Xystras
In this presentation, Chris discusses the approach they devised for executing chaos engineering scenarios. The aim was to conduct exercises for new team members, acquainting them with alarms and the complete incident response procedure to ensure their preparedness for real situations. He demonstrated the rationale behind conducting such experiments, the design process, implementation, and ultimately, the evaluation and application of the solution.
Conclusion
This is a brief summary of some of the talks I attended. I’d like to thank the Devoxx team for organizing such a professionally-run conference. The audience was genuinely enthusiastic, and many valuable and meaningful conversations and connections took place. Be sure to visit Devoxx’s official website or Facebook page. I’ll attempt to share my impressions of the remaining talks in a future post.