Devoxx US 2017 Recap

 

Devoxx US 2017 was back in March 21-23 of this year, and I’m only now getting around to posting an article about it.

The conference was in the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, which is quite a convenient venue for me. It’s only a little bit farther from home than my office. The session rooms and exhibition space were pretty nice too.

Unfortunately, the attendance seemed fairly light, which might have had something to do with the postponement of the next Devoxx US until 2019, skipping 2018.

An uncrowded conference meant there was more time for conversations with other speakers and other conference attendees. This was really great. I remember one conversation in particular with Trisha Gee where we had time to talk about nulls and Optional in detail. Some of the ideas from this conversation wound up in an article Code Smells: Null that she wrote recently.

As is typical, I had several sessions at the conference.

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Ten Simple Rules for Writing Great Test Cases
– conference session with Steve Poole | slides | video

This is somewhat refreshed and updated version of the BOF Ten Things You Should Know When Writing Good Unit Test Cases in Java that Paul Thwaite (Steve’s colleague at IBM) and I had at JavaOne 2013. We didn’t actually update it all that much; I think most of the advice here is quite broadly applicable and doesn’t go obsolete. Actually, we did update it – “now with added cloud.”

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Streams in JDK 8: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
– BOF with Simon Ritter | slides

This was a reprise of the BOF that Simon gave at Devoxx BE 2016 where he pulled me up front and asked me to provide some extemporaneous commentary. This worked so well that we decided to have me as an official co-speaker for the BOF this time.

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Collections Refueled – conference session | slides | video

This is my talk about the new stuff in the Collections Framework in Java 8 and 9. Unfortunately, I didn’t prepare for this very well, and I had 60 minutes of material but only 45 minutes to present it. I ended up having to skip a bunch of the Java 9 material towards the end. (My JavaOne 2016 version of this talk is probably better.)

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Optional: The Mother of all Bikesheds – conference session | slides | video

I’m happy to say that this was the second-highest rated talk at Devoxx US, according to the ratings shown by the Java Posse during the closing keynote:

Hm, these are Devoxx alternative facts, so maybe they’re alternative ratings as well.

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There is a YouTube playlist of all Devoxx US 2017 sessions, so if you missed anything you can always go back and replay it.