JPrime conference

I love going to conferences. You get to meet a lot of people and learn about the latest cool stuff that is happening. I always leave conferences charged with new ideas, enthusiastic to learn, keen to try new technologies, happy that I met and talked with some cool people.

JPrime

JPrime is a brand new conference organized by the Bulgarian Java User Group. Its first edition was last week on 27 of May 2015 and it was one of the best conferences I have ever attended. Big thanks for all the organizers of this great event. Your motivation was really unmatched and it showed.

What made JPrime good?

• Quality content – quality high and consistent
• Give people time to talk and rest – longer breaks between sessions were great
• Food – was good and there was plenty of it

Sessions

Opening keynote was short. I have experienced keynotes that do not start on time or are too long. So long they get in the way of the scheduled sessions after them. This was not the case here.

There were two tracks so I had no time to visit all the sessions. Here is something for the ones I attended.

Microservices and Modularity or the difference between treatment and cure!
by Milen Dyankov

I loved the way Milen has structured his talk and the examples he gave. His main point was that nothing can cure complexity. It will never go away. But there are ways to treat it, so it becomes easier to manage. You do not solve it if you move it from within a component to the connection between components. You just transfer it to a place where it is harder to manage.

Milen showed how to make an application more modular first and what are the benefits for that. Only after modularity was achieved he proceeded to extract one of the modules as a service.

Coding Culture
by Sven Peters

This was one of my favorite talks. I am glad we had this kind of talk on JPrime, as I believe culture is more important that any particular piece of technology.

If we rate lectors by presentation skill Sven will be an easy number one. He started with why good culture is important for developer happiness. Than the talk continued with many cool and quite entertaining experiences from his work at Atlassian. Sven showed us their company values, why they are important and how they are used.

JCache is here. Say Goodbye to proprietary Caching APIs!
by Jaromir Hamala

Jaromir’s “sometimes quite silly” talk showed us how easy it is to work with JCache. He started with some of the history behind the project and a brief description. Jaromir than showed some of its implementations and also what are the limitations of the API. For example it was surprising to many of us that eviction from cache was missing from the specification. Jaromir had researched this topic and provided us with a good explanation why.

The Secrets of Concurrency
by Heinz Kabutz

My favorite talk. Heinz grabbed our attention from the start. I loved how he included stories and made real life analogies. This helped him explain us some basic and usually boring principles in multithreading. I left this talk with a desire to grab a keyboard, write code and produce deadlocks! Favorite quote: “concurrency is hard and only perfect is good enough”. If you are interested – check it out on his website.

Common sense driven development
by Bozhidar Bozhanov

Bozhidar is one of the bloggers I follow so I had high expectations from this talk. The talk purpose was to explain what is common sense in software development and why it is unfortunately not so common. As such definition is almost impossible he instead focused on what it is NOT instead. While he started a bit slow he gained speed during the talk and the examples he used were entertaining and on point.

Make Your Existing App Android Wear Compatible
by Orhun Mert Simsek

I went to this talk because Android Wear sounds interesting. Mert did a brief introduction in what are Android wearables, than showed us how easy it is to develop for them. There was also a short demo. I admit I did not enjoy this talk that much as I unfortunately found the topic a bit boring. But I guess it is my own fault that I went to that talk and not another one 🙂

Final words

For a long time we had only one big Java Conference in Bulgaria. Not anymore. I can see JPrime becoming the biggest Java conference here in near future. Even on the first edition it already set some high standards, so I hope we see it even better and bigger next year and in the years to come. Big thanks to all the organizers once again.