Because our customers expect only the best from our IT professionals, we invest heavily in the development of our team.

That is also why it makes perfect sense for us to invite all colleagues to join in to go to events such as #Devoxx.

For knowledge development and to catch up on latest and greatest in new technology, as well as to have a laugh and share a beer in one of Belgium’s infamous beer café’s. After all, when in Rome…

Alright, back to business. We attended multiple great technical sessions and asked everyone to share some of their personal favourite moments. Here we go:

Highlighted sessions

Marco Bruining: For me “Three common pitfalls in Microservice integration and how to avoid them” by Bernd Rücker is one that stood out. It was an interesting session about the flow when using Microservices. Bernd gave useful insights into tools and patterns to create good flows.

Michel van de Wouw: “A Dozen ways to hack your brain to write fluently” by Dan Allen was a nice non-technical session that made me aware of the fact that replies by email are not as effective as a written out solutions on Confluence (a team collaboration platform), that provide a form of logging as well. Furthermore, I loved the session of Burr Sutter, “Kubernetes: your next Java Application Server”. He gave a great demo regarding Kubernetes with Istio.

Ron Boortman: “Deep Learning in Computer Vision” by Krzysztof Kudrynski gave great views on future solutions transforming brain signals into instant images, by using big data and machine learning. The speakers were very enthusiastic and passionate and I could see future solutions being formed in front of my eyes.

Davin Sylvester: “Java, today and tomorrow” by Mark Reinhold was one of the best sessions in my opinion. He gave a good outlook on where Java is going in the near future.

Huub Verdel: I’d choose “Mind control in JavaScript and experimenting with evolving interactions” by Charlie Gerard. She showed that it is possible without extensive technical background to read thoughts by using a self-build framework in JavaScript.

Michel ten Voorde: I really enjoyed the session “Three.js, easy 3D in your browser for when two dimensions just aren’t enough” by Jos Dirksen. Jos gave a very interesting demo on the use of augmented reality by using just a few rules of JavaScript code.

Marc van Meer: It is really hard for me to give my highlights for #Devoxx because there were so many interesting sessions: about Micronaut, Kotlin, Agile, Go, Spring Kubernetes, Java and many others. But if I have to choose one, my choice would be “Functional Programming patterns with Java8” by Victor Rentea. The energy that Victor shared with the audience and of course the technical content were both very inspiring. Especially the Lambda’s, Streams and Optionals in Java8 caught my attention.

Arjan Pas: “Untangling the mysteries of qubits” by Roy van Rijn was a mind-boggling session. The promise of new opportunities with Quantum Computing in the near future is very interesting, and scary at the same time. Roy gave a very nice overview of how Quantum Computing works and what its potential is.

Eric Engels: Like Huub I was also impressed by “Mind control in Javascript and experimenting with evolving interactions” by Charlie Gerard. It revolved around an API she developed, to command machines using a brain sensor. Making drones fly just by thinking about it… amazing. Another memorable talk, or workshop, was “AutoML + ML APIs = machine learning for all developers” by Laurent Picard. Demonstrating Machine Learning in real life use cases.

Wrap up?

It was well worth going. We highly recommend #Devoxx to all Ops and Dev engineers. Speaking of which… if you are interested in conferences like Devoxx and like to attend them together with our colleagues, please let me know. There is still some room for new colleagues left.