The past week I’ve been in Krakow for the GeeCON conference. It’s a very big Java/JVM conference with more than 1200 attendees, 3 days packed with talks and 5 tracks every day!
I went there to talk about Grails with my “Grails and the real-time world” talk and I’m really happy about how the talk went. In case you’re interested, the slides and the code are available.
My favourite talks were:
- A peek under Groovy’s hood by Kamil Szymański: The talk reminded me a little bit of the “Groovy Puzzlers” talk. Kamil explained with short code examples different parts of Groovy and things you should care about when you are using Groovy. As he said, all of these behaviours are explained in the documentation, so it’s worth taking a look at it. The talk was great and I learnt some new things about Groovy.
- Understanding Java byte code by Rafael Winterhalter. The talk was really nice. Rafael explained in a very simple way and with short examples how the code is converted to the equivalent jvm instructions. He then also explained why the invokedynamic has been a game changer for the dynamic languages in the JVM and at the end he also showed us a little example of a nice library he had built, ByteBuddy, to modify and inject our code into the final bytecode.
- Hystrix – managing failures in distributed systems by Tomasz Nurkiewicz. The talk had a great start because Tomasz’s intro went like This is my first and also my last slide so let’s see some code!. Then he started doing some live coding for the whole talk and he explained what is this Hystrix library created by Netflix, the problems it solves, the circuit-breaker theory and why it is important not to propagate errors, how you can use it, configure it,… Everything was explained very well with a lot of examples and demos, and at the end he also showed the nice dashboard that is also available with Hystrix to see the state of the application in real-time. The talk was really awesome and now I need to play a little bit with Hystrix!
Being in Krakow for a week has been great. I arrived with my wife some days before the conference and we were sightseeing the city, Auschwitz (it’s mandatory if you go the Krakow), the Salt Mine, the Castle,… Then she went back to Madrid and I stayed for the conference.
The venue of the conference was a big cinema so you can see put slides on a very big screen:
The organization was very good, there was always food, coffee, some juices,… I really like this kind of venues for a conference. So kudos to the organizers because everything was great. And do you know what is also great? The speakers dinners. Yes, we had three speakers dinners, one each day of the conference!
It has been a great experience to be there because I went out of my comfort zone and I had the chance to meet new people and talk about very interesting topics with them.
The next stop of my #IvánOnTour2015 trip will be Copenhagen for GR8Conf in just two weeks!