Devoxx Antwerp 2016 Recap

Now that Devoxx US is imminent, it’s about time for me to post about Devoxx BE 2016, which took place in November 2016 in Antwerp. That was several months ago, which was ages in conference time, so this post is mainly a placeholder to host slides and links to the videos.

Array Linked to a List, the Full Story! – José Paumard (video)

I was surprised to find that I was mentioned by name in the abstract for this university session. José Paumard took a tweet of mine from a year earlier (actually one by my alter ego, Dr Deprecator) and turned it into an entire university session. José was happy to have me attend the session, and he was gracious enough to invite me on stage for a few comments and questions.

Streams in JDK 8: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly – Simon Ritter (BOF)

This was another of my impromptu appearances. Simon had submitted this session, and he asked me to join him in presenting it. I said that I wasn’t sure what I would speak about. He said to me, “I’ll put up a slide and say a few words about it. I’m sure you’ll have an opinion.” (He was right.) This was a BOF, so it was pretty informal, but Simon came up with some really interesting examples, and we had a good discussion and covered a lot of issues.

Simon and I will be repeating this BOF at Devoxx US this coming week.

Ask the JDK Architects – panel session (video)

This was a panel session featuring Mark Reinhold and Brian Goetz (the actual JDK architects) along with Alan Bateman and myself (JDK Core Libraries engineers). This session consisted entirely of answering questions from the audience.

Optional: The Mother of All Bikesheds – conference session (slides, video)

This was a conference session about a single Java 8 API, java.util.Optional. Some were were skeptical that I could talk for an entire hour about a single API. I proved them wrong. Credit for the title goes to my übermanager at Oracle, Jeannette Hung. It refers to the many protracted mailing list discussions (“centithreads”) about the design of Optional.

Thinking in Parallel – joint conference session with Brian Goetz (slides, video)

This was an amazing experience because the auditorium was so full that people were sitting on the steps. Brian Goetz was the big draw here, but I also think it was packed because there were fewer sessions running at the same time.

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I was pleased to learn that both of my conference sessions were in the top 20 talks for the conference. Thanks for your support!