Location and attendance
Phantasialand remains a top-notch location, especially when the weather is as great as it was on the 19th of March, when we attended the conference with three Viaboxx team members.
Attendance figures increased again in comparison to last year as one could already notice by the parking situation. More than 2,000 IT specialists and developers attended the conference in its 6th year, which is a new record again. The first Javaland in 2014 started with 800 participants.
Presentations and lectures
The topics were very divers and often not directly linked to Java, frequently evolving around microservices and cloud, Docker, Kubernetes etc.
An exception to the prior statement was a very interesting talk about off-heap memory management, short-circuit streams and other performance related JVM features.
One of our team members focused on presentations in the area of team work, motivation and innovation. His highlight was a talk from Sven Peters titled “The secret of successful teams”. Thanks to this great presentation, which was given in German underlined by very professional slides, we will have a closer look at the Atlassian Team Playbook and a promising management framework called OKR – Objectives and Key Results.
Another interesting talk in this field was held by Felix Braun who addressed questions around innovation in enterprises, such as “What is actually meant by innovation?” and “What is our joint objective as a company and on the basis of this common ground, how can we create a culture that encourages autonomy and risk-taking?”
Another interesting talk was held by Martin Fahl about the advantages of design languages across systems and how an overall semiotic across devices and platforms ensures that people quickly find their way. He went also deeper into material design and even gave a specific example related to React.
The talk about data consistency in distributed systems by Bernd Rücker was very well researched and taught us about the redefinition of the ACID principle for distributed systems (ACID 2.0) and made us realise that technical errors can often only be solved by professional compensation.
On a downside, the architecture talks regarding functional programming were not as informative as expected. Furthermore, the smaller talks were often so crowded that you could not get a seat when you were attending a talk in another conference room before.
Last but not least, the talk by Timm Hirsens was very interesting to us as it had a lot of common points with the technologies employed in our research project Multisensor. The passed on practical experience with Spring, Docker and especially Kubernetes was very insightful.
Networking
Once again, it was great to meet old acquaintances from the Cologne/Bonn area, which also led to a full inbox on the next day. The Javaland conference is a great opportunity to network, run across old faces and get to know new ones. By chance, we also had some interesting conversations about possible fields of coorperation.
All in all, we are very much looking forward to the next Javaland in 2020 and hope to see you there!