I kinda liked the retrospective post that I did for my major conference last year, so I decided to do it again for Voxxed Days Zurich. As a speaker, it was really nice - the venue was as I remembered as an attendee, i.e., pretty awesome. Speaking on a cinema is quite unique!
First of all, me and Jesper Findahlwere really happy and honored to present the technology we have been using as part of the REFLEX project. We really like doing NLP in particular with the amazing Spacy library. Thanks again to Voxxed Days Zürich organizers for accepting our talk, and from CodeLounge , Software Institute (USI) and USI Università della Svizzera italiana for supporting our trip. A special thanks goes Federico Yankelevichand Patrick Baumgartnerfor their amazing work during the speaker’s dinner and the conference day.
The talks I’ve seen
The conference really started in the best possible way with a keynote from Adam Tornhill. The decade-long journey that he and his company CodeScene has started has really changed the practice of managing technical debt in particular and software quality in general.
As a little personal note, I really appreciated that he mentioned one of the papersI co-authored (with Michele Lanza, first author Roberto Minelli). I’m really proud of that paper.
One of the things that I really like is the direction where Java is going as a language. This year, I’ve started teaching Java 21 with most of its new features, in particular pattern matching and records with sealed interfaces. The talk by Nicolai Parlogis really awesome in presenting the new features of Java 21 with a nice case study - Crawling Github.
Sometimes we as developers tend to focus too much on code and the technical aspects related to it. Voytek Pituładid an amazing job on reminding that communication has also a prominent role in development - especially since most of the activities of modern development, like code review and domain modeling require proper management of it.
Another interesting talk I enjoyed was this one by Nataliia Dziubenkofrom Xebia on the (hidden) dynamic life of Java. I knew a few of the things she talked about - like invokeDynamic on the JVM - but many other things were completely new to me. In particular, it has been very interesting to see how these features are used to implement some functionalities at the language level, like pattern matching for switch or lambdas.
As a teacher and user of Springboot the talk by Maciej Walkowiakwas the source of many new things I learned. I tend to ignore performance issues in general because I’ve never got serious issues or requirement on that side. But honestly, I now know what to look for.
Last but not least, one of my favorite talks of the day was the one by Jarek Ratajski. While I’m more a Scala fanboy than a Kotlin fanboy, from time to time I like to write some locs in Jetbrain’s language and more importantly have a look to where things are going with other (JVM) languages. In fact, I’ve learned a few new recent things like the way Kotlin allows to implement type classes. In any case, Jarek is really an amazing presenter and this talk really shines.