Devoxx, the yearly overload on JVM related inspiring talks. With a total of 200 sessions it’s impossible to see them all. But I’ll like to share my experiences and thoughts…
MICROSERVICE ARCHITECTURES
One year is quite a long time in our fast paced digital world! But I can assure you that “Microservices” and “Docker” are still the buzzwords. While last year was about defining microservices and creating that theoretical consensus. Devoxx 2016 sessions really got practical about the matter. The speakers tried to give answers to questions like:
- “How do we manage authentication and authorization?” YouTube
- “What are the implication on security?” YouTube
- “How to break your monolithic database?” YouTube
- “What about messaging?” YouTube
It’s clear that the microservice architecture paradigm has matured and we are now worrying about the implementation issues of it.
BLOCKCHAIN IS MUCH MORE THAN BITCOIN
Only one talk about blockchain, but one that gave me new insights. The session “Why you should really care about the blockchain” did really show me why I should care about the Blockchain design pattern. It’s a pattern on which we can build new kind of distributed applications. An easy to understand highly recommended talk! YouTube
Google’s deep learning products
The main theme this year was Deep Learning. For this subject I focussed on Google. I did not attent the sessions about Watson… yet! Fortunately all session are available on YouTube! Off course I was already aware that AI is getting a lot of traction these days. But I could not yet grasp the bigger picture. And apparently it’s already in almost every google app. They showed us how neural networks analyse images in a very detailed way. They showed us the process of voice recognition and natural language processing. They even figure out the emotional mood from the end user…But the most impressive part of it all is that they made it so easy to embed it into your own applications. At the moment they offer the Speech, Vision, Natural language and translation APIs which you can embed without any extra effort. They also made it possible to make your own custom AI with TensorFlow and train it on their Cloud machine learning service. This session gives a very nice overview: YouTube.
With all of the above, one would almost forget that it is a Java conference. I did not really focus on the core java sessions. But what I’m excited about in the Java 9 announcement is that modularity has finally arrived and the birth of the Java shell. And off course a whole bunch of other interesting stuff ?
Already looking forward to next year!!
Greetings
Samuel Vandecasteele
