62 talks, 16 workshops, and more than 500 attendees. These are some of the numbers of JBCNConf 2018, the largest JVM related conference in Spain. It took place - as my header image has already revealed - in Barcelona from 11th to 13th of June. Fortunately, I had the pleasure to attend this congress and will take this chance to lose a couple of words about my favorite sessions.
The biggest #Java lovers gathering in Spain is ON!! Only in #Jbcn18 😎👏🏻 pic.twitter.com/349Prr0xk8
— JBCNconf (@jbcnconf) 11 June 2018
The event kicked off with a non-technical but very interesting talk about science in movies by UPC physics professor Jordi José. In my opinion, it was a great way to break the ice and as a sci-fi fan, I particularly enjoyed this talk.
Jordi Jose explains in the #jbcn18 talk “Surfing through Spacetime” why you shouldn’t trust Bruce Willis when it comes to science in movies 😂 pic.twitter.com/BU5iqNikmi
— JBCNconf (@jbcnconf) 11 June 2018
Afterwards, everyone was ready for diving into technical talks.
Asynchronous programming with Kotlin coroutines
Kotlin coroutines are a new Kotlin feature that already existed in other programming languages but which was lately introduced in Kotlin 1.1.
Konrad Kamiński is talking about asynchronous programing with kotlin! #jbcn18 #kotlin #corutines pic.twitter.com/Kg6xQrE9Qz
— JBCNconf (@jbcnconf) 12 June 2018
It was interesting to listen to Konrad Kamiński presenting a couple of exercises to compare coroutines’ performance with threads’. To sum it up, he described coroutines as lightweight threads and used some practical examples to explain how they work.
The next evolution of microservices patterns with Istio Mesh
My favourite talk was related to Istio, which is a service mesh solution.
Christian Posta (@christianposta) in introducing us to Envoy Proxy and https://t.co/2yB3vsX3QQ Service Mesh, discussing how they solve these problems more elegantly by pushing these concerns down to the infrastructure layer. He even have demos of how it all works! Only in #Jbcn18 pic.twitter.com/ynZNvHwnzI
— JBCNconf (@jbcnconf) 12 June 2018
Christian Posta elaborated on the benefits of extracting all infrastructure related concerns, such as security or api time-outs, into a specific layer above all microservices, the so-called service mesh. He introduced Istio as one of the solutions to implement such a layer, but pointed out that it’s still under development and perhaps not completely ready for production.
Workshops
As I mentioned in the introduction, there were also a number of workshops, which took place during the last day of the congress. However, I personally didn’t like them that much because they were quite basic, too entry level for my taste. At least those I attended. So hopefully, there will be some more advanced ones next year 😉.
Conclusion
All in all, I enjoyed my experience at JBCNConf. I had the chance to listen to other people’s opinions and experiences and compare them to mine. Which is great! Additionally, I met some former colleagues and enjoyed the beautiful weather and food.
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