Great Indian Developer Summit 2018

Today, I attended GIDS18 (Great Indian Developer Summit). It spans 5 days with following topics covered.

  • Web & Mobile
  • Java & Dynamic Lang
  • Data & Cloud
  • Devops & Architecture
  • Deep Dive

I thought of attending one day and learn about the trends in a specific topic. From my previous post you might have already guessed which one I had chosen.

I went for Java & Dynamic Lang!

It was a great snack for my new obsession about JVM. I got to explore and learn about various programming languages that rely on the JVM. However, I didn’t get a chance to learn solely about the JVM in detail.

I strongly felt that the Java community is very mature than the last time I visited it (2 years back - 2015ish). It is now having amazing and very careful improvements to the language like lambdas for example. Other than that I see a lot of frameworks like Akka, vertx etc. They are all heavily abstracted and the speakers were keen on how it makes life easy for everybody.

That’s good. But, I guess I will still stick with visiting the old to understand the new. I am pretty sure that if I spend time with the documentation of those highly abstracted libraries, I would end up getting the idea of some uses cases but I am too afraid that I would never be able to learn and know what is really going on. (This fear is a reality in case of Node.js for me and it is a topic of its own to visit someday).

Some of the talks I liked are

  • “Do Not Walk Away from Complexity, Run” - Venkat Subramaniam : I am waiting for the video to be available on Youtube. This has a lot of nice things for programmers to keep in mind.
  • “Revisiting Effective Java in 2018” - Edson Yanaga : This talk totally got me into adding the Effective Java book to my wishlist.
  • “Asynchronous Programming with Kotlin” - Hadi Hariri : I tried out Kotlin when it was in very early stages. It was not really usable for many things at that time. It is amazing to see a language come this far and flourish. I learnt about Coroutines, which are pretty much like Go routines.
  • “Seriously, Use Groovy NOW” - Kenneth Kousen : Got a taste of Groovy for the first time. It feels pretty much like JavaScript, but it could be seen as an enhanced Java with opinionated defaults.
  • “A new Asynchronous Database Access API” - Rajesh Tiwary : Got an idea about JDBC which makes synchronous calls and blocks the thread and whereas a new standard which they call it ADBA (Asynchronous Database Access API) for accessing Databases asynchronously.

My entire notes for the day is 6 lines.

  1. Check out fn - (Bonus - It is written in Go)
  2. Book wish - Thinking, Fast and Slow
  3. Check out squbs from Paypal.
  4. Book wish - Effective Java book
  5. Book wish - Migrating to Microservice Databases: From Relational Monolith to Distributed Data
  6. Check out http://www.reactive-streams.org/

I also got some goodies! (The photo didn’t come very well. So, maybe some other time.)

Hmm, well. It went well.