Last past week I’ve been in Copenhagen for the GR8Conf. It has been the second time I went to the conference but this time I went to present two talks.
The conference “started” on Monday with the traditional speakers dinner and I had a very nice dinner talking with Daniel, his girlfriend Hillary and Jenn. Then during the 3 days at the conference I also talked with some interesting people such as Sascha, Burt, Søren (the GR8Conf organizer), Noam, Guillaume, Ryan, Vladimír, Göran and many more.
The next day the conference started with the “University day” which is a full day with workshops instead of talks. At the end of that day we had the traditional Hackergarten organized by Andrés Almiray. I finally found the time I needed to merge five pull requests, fix one bug and release two versions of the Grails Postgresql-Extensions plugin. And speaking about this plugin, it was funny because during the conference, two different people approached me asking if I was the creator of the plugin because they wanted to thank me (and Alonso) for it. We were talking a little bit and both of them had sent some pull requests and were very happy about it. That’s why Opensource rocks!
The conference has been a great opportunity for me to talk with old friends and also finally meet some people such as Daniel and Ryan. We already know each other “by Twitter” by now we really now each other 😛
The organization of the conference was really good, the venue, the food, the beers,… The only “but” is that this year they had some problems with the BBQ but at the end they switched to indian food, so it was fine.
My favourite talks were:
- Ratpack 101 by Álvaro Sánchez-Mariscal: Actually it wasn’t a talk but a workshop. Álvaro did a great job explain the basic things about Ratpack and then giving us enough time to do some exercises. He managed very well the time of the workshop and I really enjoyed a lot. Now I need to find a project in which I can use Ratpack.
- YouDebug – Scriptable JVM Debugger by Wolfgang Schell: The topic of the talk was a little bit “strange” because YouDebug is a different debugging tool. Wolfgang created a very simple web application with a bug and then he showed us how to trace the bug and even fix it in a running application just using YouDebug.
- Grails under the Hood by Jeff Brown: Jeff explain with some pseudo-code how some “Grails Magic” works. For example, when we define a controller with a command object, what Grails does is create a new method without the parameter, instantiate the controller, bind the parameters, do the dependency injection and then validate it and finally call our real controller action. The talk was really nice and I learned new things about Grails.
And about my talks, the first one was an introduction to Spring Boot and Groovy and the second one was about Testing Java and Groovy applications with Spock. I think that both talks were fine.
For the first one I finished just in time so I hadn’t time for questions but a lot of people approach me later to give me some feedback and ask me more questions.
For the Spock talk I did some kind of live-coding session showing some examples that I have prepared, running the tests, modifiyng the code and explaining a lot of things. At the end, I had again a lot of questions and a very good feedback.
The slides and the code for of both talks are available here:
- Spring Boot and Groovy. What more do you need?: slides and code.
- Testing with Spock. The logical choice: slides and code.
This has been the last stop of my IvánOnTour2015 before the summer. At the end I’ve been in six conferences in less than three months, so now I need to take a break.
The next conference for me will be the SpringOne 2GX in Washington DC next September. I’ll be there presenting three talks.