This year the event took place at Expo XXI Hall in Warsaw to gather the JVM community and companies eager to open their doors to witty newcomers. With #VLteam members engaged both on stage and at our stand, supporting and attending Confitura 2022 was a no-brainer.
The people and the atmosphere, dozens of enjoyable chitty chats – that’s what we came for! Kudos to the organiser for an excellent lineup of speakers, with Artur Skowroński, our Tech Lead, with an opening keynote speech, “Migracja Legacy… Inaczej”.
In VirtusLab, we love spending time together and do it as often as possible. To mention our VL Family Picnic we had a few weeks ago!
And with these excellent and vibrant memories, we have brought the picnic vibe into the Expo Hall! Who could resist chilling with a cold drink on a sunbed between the immersive presentations?
Another highlight was an outdoor game prepared by our #People Team. Recreating it in a conference environment was quite a challenge! We have invited all attendees to join in – collect all VL-pet stickers across the venue (including organisers and our keynote speaker, Artur) and win great prizes! Huge congratulations to the winners who returned home with headless earphones, picnic blankets, and mugs.
The second contest was a bit stumper for all IT geeks and its history enthusiasts – more than 80 of you took this challenge!
But we enjoyed the chance to talk to the developers the most. We had the best time sharing stories from our #VLteam life & JVM-based expertise with you.
Let’s start with “No dobra, czas zsynchronizować zegarki…” (Well, it’s time to synchronise watches…) by Maciej Próchniak. Whoever had the “pleasure” of working with time-dependent distributed systems doesn’t laugh at the circus, so it’s worth getting to know this seemingly basic process from the inside out. Time is hard to tame, so I recommend hunting down presentations by Maciek. It will allow you to understand better the challenges posed by the inescapable passage of time.
I loved Tomek Nurkiewicz’s presentation entitled “Loom: rewolucja czy szczegół implementacyjny?” (Loom: revolution or implementation detail?). Loom is often considered coroutines on the JVM, and Tomek is a well-known expert on reactive systems, the other flavour of concurrency. I was very curious to hear his opinion. Of course, we do not get a simple answer to the question asked in the title. Still, this talk outlined the potential use cases for Loom and inhibited those who see in it the Holy Grail (unless you write frameworks and libraries – then interesting years ahead of you).
I once dreamed of a career as a game developer. After some time, I decided that I prefer to play games (apparently, knowing how the dish is made can take away your appetite), but I was happy to attend “GameDev okiem Backendowca“ (GameDev as seen from the Backend) by Robert Piwowarek. It’s always interesting to see how a change of domain transforms some problems into completely different ones, plus new ones appear.
Also, as always, the real bomb was Krzysztof Kudrynski and his “Jak działają autonomiczne samochody” (How autonomous cars work). The presentation is a very pleasant introduction to the world of problems related to vehicles controlled by deep networks, additionally (as usual with Krzysztof) delivered in an unforced, funny way.
Few interesting presentations about various topics, not necessarily about JVM. Very nice talk by Jakub Nabradlik about practices he uses, i. e. I’ve learned about mob review, that I’d like to introduce to my team. I also liked the talk about software architecture and who the architect actually is.
The people were quite interested in what we do in VirtusLab, so I spent most of my breaks describing our project and what current vacancies we have.
I find Artur’s presentation very engaging and relatable, with some valuable points about the approach to the legacy code.
The presentation called `Demystifying “event-based” software concepts and methodologies` was maybe a little bit basic, however, it could be a perfect introduction to event-based systems for people who do not have knowledge of such an approach. The same goes for presentation “Spokojnie, to tylko FP”.
First of all, thanks to Artur’s presentation and way of speaking, everybody who didn’t have time to grab a coffee didn’t need it anymore 😉 Artur gave us an excellent start for a conference and showed an interesting view of legacy in the modern world.
I always adored Jakub’s Nabrdalik concrete way of speaking and ability to share a bunch of practice hints on how to better work in a project and with code. It was the same this time – from thinking about if we need to implement something to choosing good drivers for decision making. Kuba also shared a few practice tips about behavioural tests and code documentation (Spock Reports), as well as reviewing and ensuring that we log every execution path.
Java internals is not something I think about every day, and I rarely spend my time learning it. Krzysztof Ślusarczyk’s presentation about the Java memory model was an interesting reminder that things we take for granted (like sequential consistency), thanks to great Java abstractions, are not so given if we try to implement low-level code using threads. I would like to follow this topic in the future.
Presentations were an exciting part of the conference, however, it’s great to know that there are so many Java engineers in Warsaw. Meeting with all of you was a great experience to learn what you like to do and how much you are interested in VirtusLab.
We’re pretty sure we’re joining the next edition of the Confitura conference! See you next time!
