JBCNConf 2018 - The largest JVM conference in Spain

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 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.

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.

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 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.

About the author

Xavier Alvarez is a Java and Kotlin Backend Developer, and an Ubuntu fanboy.