DevBcn 2024 - Barcelona

Introduction

DevBcn is the rebirth of the old JBCNConf, a conference that has been held in Barcelona for many years and is probably one of the most Java-centric conferences in Spain. After a long time of wanting to attend this conference, I finally managed to attend this year's edition, DevBcn 2024. Even though my expectations were high due to all its good press, the conference exceeded them by far.

Let me share with you some of the highlights of the conference, starting with my impressions of my session.

Developing a Full-Stack Reactive Application Using Kubernetes as an Event Producer

My talk was centered around the development of a full-stack reactive application using Kubernetes as an event producer. The main purpose was to highlight the advantages and challenges of reactive application development by leveraging a real-world example. In this case, I used one of my side projects, YAKD, a full-featured Kubernetes dashboard.

You can check the slides of the talk here.

I will also share the recording of the talk as soon as it is available.

I'm really happy with how the talk went and the feedback I received from the audience. People seemed to be very interested in the topic and I think I managed to convey the main message I wanted to share.

The Conference

I had a great time at DevBcn 2024. Starting from the speaker's dinner the day before the conference, where I had the chance to meet some of the speakers and organizers. The attendance was lower than in previous editions, but it was quite good overall.

According to the organization, these are some of the numbers:

• 705 attendees
• 76 speakers
• 5 tracks
• 71 sessions

Java & JVM track

I spent most of the conference attending the Java & JVM track. It was refreshing to see so many talks about Java and the JVM, and not so much about AI, ML, and big data, which are the topics that seem to be trending lately.

I particularly liked the talk from Pratik Patel about Garbage Collector (GC) algorithms for the cloud. I think he did a great job explaining the different GC algorithms and how they might be affected in the cloud environment in a very simple way.

These are some of the other talks I enjoyed:

• Ana Maria Mihalceanu talked about the new tools available beyond Java 17.
• Marharyta Nedzelska and Evgeny Mandrikov, the code coverage MythBusters, did a fun talk about the myths and truths of code coverage.
• Trisha's talk about testing which dealt with a few topics that deeply resonated with me.
• Maria Arias, my Red Hat colleague talked about Micronaut, Spring, and Quarkus and their integration with the Jakarta specs.
• Aicha Laafia and her talk about building sustainable software with Java.

Best Speaker

Last but not least, I won the Best Speaker award!

I attended many of the other talks, and I know for a fact that I wasn't the best speaker overall. Especially considering there were many professional speakers and devrels who did an amazing job. My talk was right after the keynote and in the biggest room, so I think this helped a lot. I also asked everyone who attended the session to provide feedback through the rating app.

Nonetheless, I'm very happy and grateful for the award. If you've known me for a while, you know that I'm very shy and that I'm not the most charismatic person either. This is a great milestone for me since it acknowledges the amount of effort I put into preparing my talks and the improvement of my public speaking skills over the years.

Thank you!

It was a blast!

I had a great time at DevBcn 2024. I met a lot of interesting people, learned a lot of new things, and had a lot of fun. If you have the chance to attend next year's edition, I highly recommend it.

The organizers Jonathan Vila and Nacho Cougil did an amazing job putting everything together. The same goes for the volunteers, the speakers, and the sponsors, who made the conference possible. Also, special thanks to Anyul Rivas who besides his work as a volunteer, was taking pictures of the event and even managed to take headshots of all the speakers.