Devoxx, formerly known as JavaPolis, is an international community conference which first took place in 2001 in Belgium. Since then it has developed into one of the largest Java events in Europe, with chapters in Belgium, France, UK, Poland and Ukraine, as well as an established conference in Morocco.
\nAmong the speakers at DevoxxUA (Devoxx Ukraine) 2019 I’d like to mention Josh Long, the Spring Developer Advocate at Pivotal and Cay Horstmann (yes, that’s him, the author of “Core Java”, “Big Java” and other great books). I got a chance to participate as a speaker on the second day of the conference, delivering a presentation on one of our latest solutions for implementing GraphQL with authorization in a microservice architecture. Was very excited to see that the talk got the highest amount of participants for that time slot and the room was packed, including people standing on their feet for the entire duration of my presentation!
\nAll in all, it was a great experience of sharing what & how we’ve built while getting valuable feedback and interesting questions. Have to say it felt incredible to stand on stage next to all the stars of the engineering world, during the closing ceremony of the conference!
\nHere's my entire talk:\n\n
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\nThe sheer amount of people interested in the next level of everything was simply overwhelming.
\nIn this article I want to highlight my personal impressions and key takeaways from being at the web summit for the first time.
\nI’m probably not alone as being a frequent user of hackernews on ycombinator as much as reddit and imgur.\nThus I was intrigued by the appearance of the initialised() crew including reddit founder Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan as much as the panel about the future of social networks that was held with the imgur founder Alan Schaaf.\nWhile Alexis and Garry from initialised() had more to say on an inspirational level of things and encouraged founders to step up by handing a set of values down to them, Allan Schaaf actually shed some light and what he thinks is the future of social networks. He mentioned snapchat, youtube and of course his own platform as open networks, that allow users to explore beyond their filter bubbles.\nHe also pointed out that he believes that social networks should be entertaining as one of their adaption KPIs. I thought all his points were valid and since that day, I started dividing social networks in \"closed/bubble\" and \"open\" categories myself.
\nFrom my university days I have a (small but significant) background in microbiology and thus I was excited to see a panel about using DNA as storage and which progress has been made so far on that technology. I was satisfied to see that there are still founders ask the questions of tomorrow's tomorrow, as in \"How can we store all of humanities data?\" Hyunjun Park and his company CATALOG are one of the solving teams on this problem.
\nWhile I thought that the visionary part and the progress that has been made so far was pretty cool, I had a million of technical questions, which unfortunately weren't being read from the web summit in-app possibility to submit questions to the talk hosts.
\nThe DNA that CATALOG is using is artificial, nevertheless my main burning question was \"Would real life viruses be a threat to those DNA-'Disks'?\" Are hackers of the future writing their own plasmid ring vectors with artificial virus DNA to destroy compromising data? That sounds like a cyberpunk short story waiting to be written.
\nSimilarly visionary questions are being asked by companies and founders who want to commercially explore space. It never occured to me, that companies like SpaceX or the cubesat projects where just the tip of the iceberg on commercial space usage.
\nWhat I learned is that there are companies like Vector Launch, that sell launches of small scale rockets that can be chartered for surprisingly low prices (50kg payload for 1.5M$, which is around 35 cubesats!). Should I become rich one day and stop caring about money, I will launch a crate of Scottish whisky into space as a measure of refining, in hope that there is also a company that salvages that stuff from space.
\nOf course fun and leisure has to be there as well, so there was also Virgin Galactic, a company that is tightly working on making space tourism a reality. Their presentation was pretty convincing. Maybe I'll save the money for the whisky and launch myself - given I'd be rich. A ticket to space currently costs 250.000$.
\nAn idea that totally baffled me was the what3words project which I find personally absolutely amazing and which in my view is just one billion-people integration away from a breakthrough. These people divided earth into a set of 3x3m squares and addressed each of them with three simple words. My desk at work is //abfinden.hübsch.ansehen - there you go! Pay me a visit.
\nThey recently integrated into the mercedes benz navigation systems and if you imagine one of the really heavy traffic websites and apps out there using what3words as a location service instead of GPS, just over night large portions of mankind would start using it.\nAfter coming home from the web summit, I found out what all kinds of w3w I have in my personal environment and I now have a w3w for my desk and my wife has one for her favourite spot on the couch. The fridge w3w is popular, the one for the dishwasher isn't. You gotta love the future!
\nI truly enjoyed my time at the Altice arena, including the night-summits and the cheap cab rides. If time allows, I will definitely try to catch the 2019 web summit. While I sometimes missed the technical deep dives on topics, it was deeply satisfying for the curios me to explore, watch and meet the hundreds and thousands of booths, speakers and enthusiasts from all over the world.
\nI’m so going to build my own cocktail robot!
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