On October 18-19th, was next edition of the GeeCON conference – one of the most important in the world of Java and related technologies – took place in Prague, Czech.
This is not the first time we have participated in this event, because we consider participation in such events mandatory for everyone who is associated with new technologies. As always, we came back richer with new knowledge and even more motivated to work. The organisers of the event focused on the idea of organising this event in a cinema, which had been tried before. This time we were hosted at the CineStar cinema in the Černý Most shopping center. Comfortable armchairs? Big scenes? Even bigger screens? No one should doubt that this conference format works exceptionally well.
What awaited us this year? The conference was opened by Michael Nygard with a speech on mutual dependencies in our systems – we tried to define what they are, indicate their types, and also looked for ways to avoid problems that would go hand in hand with application development. There was also a reflection on the fact that “coupling” – that is, interconnection coupling – is something present for a long time in many branches of engineering and industry and is the foundation of numerous inventions and processes. However, in our industry we have tended to avoid these relationships, because they are often the source of many unexpected problems.
Peter Van de Voorde – one of many Atlassian employees working in such a form – devoted his speech to the issue of remote work. To all young and ambitious developers who have not yet experienced remote working and already have their own ideas about it, we need to spoil the mood a bit – it is not always as rosy as it seems and code is not always created, sipping coffee at Starbucks. As with many things, remote work has its pros and cons. The answer to the question “Is this right for me?” is: “It depends.” This topic touched the participants so much, that the lobbying talks affected the problem of organising work in entire teams, which is a big challenge for a company employing people around the world.
Of course, it would not be GeeCON if we did not finally get into technical topics, and eventually – programming. Some less kind, will say that everything has been said about microservices, but new solutions and frameworks are still emerging. We learned two tools at the conference. Helidon – a library set supporting the creation of microservices developed by Oracle. Helidon is available in two variants – the first is a more classic implementation of the MicroProfile standard, the second is a very light microfiber-supporting reactive application development. The second tool is JLupine. It is a framework that works on a different layer than e.g. Spring and this type of solution (it is independent of other frameworks used, but offers support for Spring) and helps us in the internal organisation of the fleet of our microservices. JLupine provides us with, among others service discovery, convenient hot-swapping, infrastructure monitoring and several other “goodies”. Conclusions? Microservices are becoming trendier and this must be acknowledged by every hard-core “monolith”.
The highly-regarded speeches also included a very substantive lecture by Nitsan Wakart on profiling and optimisation of memory allocation in a JVM machine, a discussion on dealing with the common issue of stress in IT projects, led by Dmitry Vinnik, and two lectures by Tomer Gabel. The first of them was … on time. During this speech, we moved from almost philosophical considerations about the passage of time to problems occurring in distributed systems. During the second lecture, we revised our state of knowledge about TDD methodologies (not without some highly controversial statements).
The organisers once again showed their professionalism, thanks to which the whole event went smoothly. We are glad we could participate in it and are looking forward to the next – see you on May 15th in Krakow at the next GeeCON conference!
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