During the past few days (July 18th-20th), I have attended JBCNConf, Spain's biggest Java/JVM conference.
About the conference
Luckily I was able to attend thanks to the raffle of MadridJUG who gifted me a ticket, and Typeform which covered the cost. This edition was the last one around Java/JVM. Next year they will rename the conference to DevBcn to cover more topics.
It was my first year, but I think they had made a grand farewell, a conference with more than one thousand attendees, and a lot of talks (~100).
Although they titled the conference "Women in tech", and each room had the name of a famous woman engineer who contributed to the history of programming. I missed a bit more transparency on diversity matters. It is also my fault because I didn't ask them about the data. I went to several talks with women speakers, but I would say ~70% of speakers were men. I would highlight it as a point to improve on DevBcn
Talks
Here is the list of talks that I attended. I will not share all detailed notes but a small overview.
Artificial Intelligence needs Backend & DevOps to reach the real-world
Nerea Luis is a great communicator and speaker. She explained why MLOps is essential and how AI models and systems have been productized and need support from other roles (Backend, SRE, Security...) who already have experience shipping customer-focused software to extract the most of AI models.
She made mentions to ML-Ops and MLFlow including Vertex AI the GCP implementation. I will post the video as soon as it is available. In the meantime, you can enjoy any other talk from Nerea Luis
The hidden gems of distributed tracing
Ana-Maria Mihalceanu made a great talk with live coding on how to do distributed tracing using jaeger and opentelemetry. She explained how open telemetry tracing works and different sampling approaches. All the code is available at GitHub: https://github.com/ammbra/hidden-gems. At this talk, I also discovered RedHat Free Sanbox
Secrets of Performance Tuning Java on Kubernetes
A funny talk about the JVM heuristics to choose GC depending on available resources with a few takeaways:
We usually trust JVM to select a GC without knowing how it works.
Consider larger pods with higher throughput over more pods.
Avoid HA cargo cult that sometimes forces us to have multiple pods increasing our bill and leading to worse resource usage optimization.
Check the slides with all the data and quick-wins
Del final al principio: Un viaje guiado por métricas
Adrian and Alberto, two engineers from Wallapop, shared their experience building the saved searches feature. They journeyed from a very complex and high-cost solution to a more practical but still valid approach covering 80% of use cases with a reduced cost. From my point of view, talks that spread Real World™️ experiences are the most valuable.
Libera la potencia de tus aplicaciones con Micronaut y GraalVM
I worked with Micronaut back in 2019-2020, and I liked it but putting my taste aside, the work they are doing to enable full integration with GraalVM deserves a watch. Suppose you are a developer using Spring or Quarkus and haven't tested Micronaut. Give it a try. Alvaro Sánchez-Mariscal introduced a bit of the framework idea and GraalVM project and made a small demo.
Jakarta EE 10 Feature by Feature
I haven't used Jakarta (javax) in a while, so I decided to attend this talk to get a fresh picture of the current development. One thing I liked is the "Core Profile". It already existed, but they have included a lot of updates, and I like the idea of seeing Java runtimes keep moving to be smaller. You can see all the updates and features on the slides
Use Testing to Develop Better Software Faster
Every developer who writes tests as their day-to-day job knows that tests are as necessary as challenging to do and maintain in the right way. Sometimes wrong testing could become an obstacle to development. Marit Van Dijk shared examples and tips. I recommend reading her article on the topic.
Java Next - From Amber to Loom, from Panama to Valhalla
Similar to the talk about Jakarta, Nicolai Parlog (nipafx) puts together all the ongoing projects to push Java/JVM to the next level. I recommend checking the slides because it is full of resources. My favorites:
dev.java
inside.java
📼 The State of Project Loom with Ron Pressler
State Of Valhalla: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to a Great Developer Career
Helen and Sven gave a great talk about why it is important to have ownership over our careers. The content was great; they have outstanding delivery skills and are easy to listen to and follow.
Talent, passion, curiosity, cooperation and a special spirit for discovery
The closing keynote was a personal history from Javier Santaolalla about his experience at CERN where he participated in the experiment which led to the Higgs Boson discovery. It was a pleasure to listen to him and to see how hard he lived his profession and passion.
Conclusion
I enjoyed this conference a lot. After almost three years without attending any conference, I have been in DDD Europe and JBCNConf within a month, and I have felt again the motivation that usually comes after an event. I will update the post with videos whenever they are available.
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