Did you know you can look multiple JavaOne presentations online at the same time? Today I found this url towards live streams. Like yesterday, also today I visited 9 sessions and gained lots of interesting knowledge. However, the main goal is to do useful research for our organization. In what technologies should we invest our time? How can we become successful in an efficient way? Let me give you some pointers. (by @KoenusTweets)
Gradle for continuous integration
The slogan behind Gradle is “build for happiness”: good news for all of us! The Gradle platform is a main trend at JavaOne, having more than 10 talks and almost all overbooked. Who would not love to replace ugly, old-fashioned XML (from Maven or Ant) by elegant Groovy configuration files? Gradle Inc., the startup behind this golden innovation, ensures Gradle is easy to learn and very good documented. I visited some talks from Gradle, one even by founder Hans Dockter (a true rock star at JavaOne). Being familiar with Gradle, I learned from the talks more in-depth knowledge and how to get started easily. Gradle is an important basis in Grails, but it can do so much more for continuous delivery. So, I am preparing slides to show, soon to other Grails developers at First8 on this matter.
DevOps: automate for efficiency
DevOps offers a new market demand, very interesting for us good engineers. I went to the DevOps talk ”confessions on an automation addict”. The speaker advised developers to start using operation tools in order the strengthen the assembly line of development. If these automation tools are missing, then it might be rewarding to make them yourself, either by shell scripts or maybe more advanced software. She confessed she has automated many times just because it was fun, which is a wrong reason. Always make sure that the tools save time (instead of costing) and also provide business value. But how to provide business value via operation tools? The Japanese presenters in a talk later that day found a creative solution. They used ELK from Elastic Search, a company of which First8 a partner, to visualize access logs for their business. Because of their log visualisation the company could datamine on the behavior of website users, leading to lots of business value. Two goals were reached via the log visualisation: understanding of both software and customers.
Craftsmanship: the fun of mastering
Having fun to master engineering is something that really fits First8 like a glove. Because at First8 we very frequently train ourselves on usefull matter in pleasant technical sessions with good food. At JavaOne I went to a talk on the ZEN of programming, based on this site with ZEN koans on engineering. As you can read there, the talk contained many funny stories on good software engineering practices. In the afternoon I went to the Hackergarten and met the project lead of Griffon. I had played with Griffon some time ago and asked him whether he could introduce me with the newest version. It was nice to use this Groovy framework geared towards mobile apps. I remembered that -months ago- it was hard to install everything, during his coding dojo everything went perfect. The most entertaining talk of the day was on Groovy puzzlers, a pub quiz with groovy experts on the Groovy language. Closure: more Java progress The progress of Java is huge. In december we will be able to explore Java9! During the “Ask the JDK architects” session, 4 famous Oracle Architects that are responsible for the JDK -including moderator Mark Reinhold, Chief Java Technology at Oracle- answer questions on our Java future. There the architects admit that synchronisation in Java can be improved, for better performance. They talk about Java9 which should be “feature complete” in december, having lots of cool features. Mark Reinhold encourages developers to start using Java9 themselves, benefit from these features and provide early feedback. Let’s explore Java9 together during a First8 Academy. 😉 
JDK architects having fun with the audience and promoting Java9
