Monday, July 15, 2019

Night before Uberconf 2019

Uberconf

It's been almost 5 years since my last NFJS event.

Back then I was complaining that there wasn't much new under the sun in the Java world.  The picture is a bit different today.  Java 8 and to some degree 9-12 have mostly addressed the concerns about the stagnation of the Java language itself.

The insane proliferation of JavaScript frameworks has shaken out somewhat with Angular, React and Vue emerging as the "big 3".  I work in AngularJS now and am feeling a bit less angstful about the whole client side than I did back in 2014.

One thing that is conspicuous to me in this year's lineup is quite a few more women presenters than in the past.  It will be interesting to see if there are more women attending this event which has traditionally been 95% male.

As always there are a bunch of agonizing choices to make.  Anybody got a Time-Turner?

A big focus at my employer right now is big data.  We are using Hadoop, Spark and Scala.  I think I first heard about Hadoop at NFJS 2010.  I see Scala on the schedule (cool language in its own right aside from big data) and a bunch of Machine Learning, but otherwise not that much.  I guess big data is ancient history these days and not that much of a focus in and of itself.

There's several talks about the recent Java releases and modular Java which kind of makes sense.  I gather a lot of users are used to sitting on the sidelines for the first year or so of a new Java release and aren't really up to speed on the new 6-month cadence.

Looks like Kotlin is a fairly hot topic.  I would kind of like to jump on this bandwagon but I'm still striving for Scala mastery... maybe next year.

There's a ton of Angular, React, Vue and JavaScript and I will probably be spending a bunch of time in these.  I'm doing better with client side than I have been for a long time but still see this as a weak area, especially with things moving so fast.

Craig Walls is going to be there with half a dozen or so Spring presentations.  Spring has been a special focus of mine for a long time.  In a way I'm working in Spring almost every day but all the new features like Reactive aren't that useful to my employer's business model, so I'm not really learning and getting hands on with something new every day.

I'm going to try to catch at least one of the GraalVM presentations, sounds cool and could be the wave of the future.  There's a lot of emphasis these days on performance and getting the fastest possible startup time for microservices.

Microservices, architecture, dev/ops, cloudy stuff, agile, security, soft skills...  It looks like NoSQL is pretty much played out as a topic.  There's still a couple of AMQP talks though Kafka is the new messaging hotness.

One last thing I'll mention, there's a talk called Web Components: The Future of Web Development is Here.  I went to a couple of talks about web components and polymer back in 2014, and, blown away by the clean, component-based model, wrote "The way most web development is done is going to completely change in the next year or so."  Well, that might be true, but not because of the widespread adoption of Web Components I envisioned.  But now, 5 years later, they really mean it!

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