May 6, 2015 at 10:02How was JPoint 2015: full house and interesting details
JPoint Java-conference in Moscow gathered a record number of spectators: more than 1000 people. Reports were presented simultaneously in four halls of the Radisson Slavic (this is not counting the "expert zones" in the hall), and they all turned out to be filled. This is despite the fact that we are talking about a hardcore technical event: there was nothing for a random person who was not related to Java. What exactly gathered so many viewers?
At the opening of the conference, those present actively applauded when the representative of the IntelliJ IDEA product manager Andrei Cheptsov appeared on the stage, and this immediately set the tone for the whole event: professional developers gathered in the hall, so that they had a company working for them that an average user had never heard of , there was star status.
However, if the reports were focused strictly on developers, then everything was different with the keynote presentation that preceded them. Traditionally, keynote does not go into the jungle of materiel, but represents a more accessible and emotional performance. And they decided to use this for a bold experiment, instead of calling the technical speaker, Dmitry Galkin , Ph.D. from Tomsk, a specialist in contemporary art. He spoke not specifically about Java, but that today art is much more closely connected with the development of technology than is commonly believed.
The theme of contemporary art almost always collects polar reviews, from "very original and interesting" to "what nonsense people suffer and plants stand." And here it happened the same way: while some listened with interest about controversial and challenging installations and performances, others asked the hackneyed question “what did the speaker smoke” (according to Galkin himself, nothing is interesting to him).
But, no matter how presented, it at least cheered up the hall in front of the main part - technical reports. Immediately after Galkin, the stage of the main hall was taken by Nikita Salnikov-Tarnovsky (Plumbr) and spoke about the fight against memory leaks - there is no longer any time for performances.
The second room at this time was occupied by Anton Keks (Codeborne), and it was interesting to observe the contrast with his own report at the recent Mobius conference in St. Petersburg . There, he talked about the features of Chromecast in a small room, and the atmosphere was chamber, but here everything felt like a rock band had conquered the stadium: a lot of people gathered, they were completely absorbed in what was happening, and after the performance they surrounded and arranged such an encore with their questions that the following speakers had to almost expel Anton from the scene. Keks himself, tall and long-haired, in the role of a "rock star" looked as appropriate as possible: he already plays the guitar in his free time and rides a motorcycle.
What exactly attracted so much attention? A storyabout why the architecture of Internet banking might be better based not on Enterprise solutions. This may seem counterintuitive (“enterprise” is associated with reliability, but for a bank this is a key concept) - but Anton very confidently explained on the basis of his experience why the bulkiness and slowness of enterprise solutions is a big drawback, what exactly can be used instead of such solutions and how to do just that.
And they drove Keks from the stage Baruch Sadogursky and Evgeny Borisovwho went there for a talk about Spring. They became real Stakhanovites of JPoint: together they also made a speech in another room with the report “Epic Groovy Puzzlers - Revenge of Brackets”, and Sadogursky later talked alone about multi-threaded HTTP applications, and also participated in the round table “Working Tools of a Java Developer”.
Meanwhile, while on the main stage, the star of the Russian Java world Alexey Shipilev talked about java.lang.String, in the fourth hall, two other Oracle representatives - Alexander Belokrylov and Alexander Mironenko - raised an interesting topic: the use of Java in areas like the “Internet of things”, where devices have very limited processing power. The title of the report- “Into an enterprise with 256 KB RAM” - it made me nostalgically recall the phrase “640 kilobytes of memory is enough for everyone” and think about how technologies are cyclically evolving, returning to the old numbers at a new level.
After that, Alexey Ragozin from Deutsche Bank spoke in the main hall - and here the hardcore nature of the conference was indicative. When the speaker is not a purely IT company, it can be assumed that this is not about technology. But here it was all about the case: his report was devoted to the continuous profiling of Java applications during operation.
The lunch break that began later outlined the main problem of the conference: when so many people get together, it is large-scale and beautiful, but at the same time it inevitably causes some organizational difficulties. In this case, they were expressed in the length of the queue: in order to get lunch, many had to stand up properly. I want to believe that the general feeling for those who came did not spoil it.
After lunch in the main hall, Andrei Pangin (Odnoklassniki) talked about debugging in conditions when standard tools are not enough and require your own, and Dmitry Chuiko (Oracle) , talking about CompletableFuture, was surprised at how many people in the hall deal with multithreading . But the real show began after that with the second releaseAlexei Shipilev : at the same time he said quite serious things and at the same time he did not let me get bored. In his presentation, the wording (“bloody enterprise”) and pictures (“compressed links” were illustrated with a clasped image of Lenin in exile) amused the audience - but at the same time made it clear what they were talking about, successfully fulfilling their main task. “Assume that most of the time you are wrong,” Shipilev said, and he did not want to object.
Finally, already at the end of the round, the Highload round table was held, and it was noteworthy, starting with the list of participants: Oleg Bunin , organizer of HighLoad ++, the main Russian conference in the field of high loads, and Odnoklassniki , from which Oleg Anastasev was presentand Andrei Pangin - a project in which they know firsthand about such loads. And here, too, despite the hardcore theme, the show turned out. To begin with, the participants discussed what highload is all about - and if this is usually associated with “the site has a lot of visits,” Bunin preferred the definition of “highload about understanding internal processes and optimizing them, if you have a standard CMS, then with any quantity the visits will not be highlod. ” And then they began to answer questions from the audience - and on the fly they sorted out the case of a specific viewer, coming to the conclusion that the problems he described were caused by generally not high loads, his system itself was unreasonably built, and this should be combated.
Perhaps this allowed the conference attendees to finally bring out a lesson, useful not only in the case of highload and Java, but in general in life: when something does not work as it should, you should not blame the "load" hastily, but think about whether it is right originally arranged.
And the conference itself became a kind of life example of a successful highly loaded project. Such a number of spectators, speakers, halls and themes - these are also high loads, which are simply not measured in the number of server requests. And if there are no hiccups, in addition to the line for lunch, the reports are not canceled and they are not knocked out of the schedule, and everything goes as planned, which means that the initial approach turned out to be correct.
At the opening of the conference, those present actively applauded when the representative of the IntelliJ IDEA product manager Andrei Cheptsov appeared on the stage, and this immediately set the tone for the whole event: professional developers gathered in the hall, so that they had a company working for them that an average user had never heard of , there was star status.
However, if the reports were focused strictly on developers, then everything was different with the keynote presentation that preceded them. Traditionally, keynote does not go into the jungle of materiel, but represents a more accessible and emotional performance. And they decided to use this for a bold experiment, instead of calling the technical speaker, Dmitry Galkin , Ph.D. from Tomsk, a specialist in contemporary art. He spoke not specifically about Java, but that today art is much more closely connected with the development of technology than is commonly believed.
The theme of contemporary art almost always collects polar reviews, from "very original and interesting" to "what nonsense people suffer and plants stand." And here it happened the same way: while some listened with interest about controversial and challenging installations and performances, others asked the hackneyed question “what did the speaker smoke” (according to Galkin himself, nothing is interesting to him).
But, no matter how presented, it at least cheered up the hall in front of the main part - technical reports. Immediately after Galkin, the stage of the main hall was taken by Nikita Salnikov-Tarnovsky (Plumbr) and spoke about the fight against memory leaks - there is no longer any time for performances.
The second room at this time was occupied by Anton Keks (Codeborne), and it was interesting to observe the contrast with his own report at the recent Mobius conference in St. Petersburg . There, he talked about the features of Chromecast in a small room, and the atmosphere was chamber, but here everything felt like a rock band had conquered the stadium: a lot of people gathered, they were completely absorbed in what was happening, and after the performance they surrounded and arranged such an encore with their questions that the following speakers had to almost expel Anton from the scene. Keks himself, tall and long-haired, in the role of a "rock star" looked as appropriate as possible: he already plays the guitar in his free time and rides a motorcycle.
What exactly attracted so much attention? A storyabout why the architecture of Internet banking might be better based not on Enterprise solutions. This may seem counterintuitive (“enterprise” is associated with reliability, but for a bank this is a key concept) - but Anton very confidently explained on the basis of his experience why the bulkiness and slowness of enterprise solutions is a big drawback, what exactly can be used instead of such solutions and how to do just that.
And they drove Keks from the stage Baruch Sadogursky and Evgeny Borisovwho went there for a talk about Spring. They became real Stakhanovites of JPoint: together they also made a speech in another room with the report “Epic Groovy Puzzlers - Revenge of Brackets”, and Sadogursky later talked alone about multi-threaded HTTP applications, and also participated in the round table “Working Tools of a Java Developer”.
Meanwhile, while on the main stage, the star of the Russian Java world Alexey Shipilev talked about java.lang.String, in the fourth hall, two other Oracle representatives - Alexander Belokrylov and Alexander Mironenko - raised an interesting topic: the use of Java in areas like the “Internet of things”, where devices have very limited processing power. The title of the report- “Into an enterprise with 256 KB RAM” - it made me nostalgically recall the phrase “640 kilobytes of memory is enough for everyone” and think about how technologies are cyclically evolving, returning to the old numbers at a new level.
After that, Alexey Ragozin from Deutsche Bank spoke in the main hall - and here the hardcore nature of the conference was indicative. When the speaker is not a purely IT company, it can be assumed that this is not about technology. But here it was all about the case: his report was devoted to the continuous profiling of Java applications during operation.
The lunch break that began later outlined the main problem of the conference: when so many people get together, it is large-scale and beautiful, but at the same time it inevitably causes some organizational difficulties. In this case, they were expressed in the length of the queue: in order to get lunch, many had to stand up properly. I want to believe that the general feeling for those who came did not spoil it.
After lunch in the main hall, Andrei Pangin (Odnoklassniki) talked about debugging in conditions when standard tools are not enough and require your own, and Dmitry Chuiko (Oracle) , talking about CompletableFuture, was surprised at how many people in the hall deal with multithreading . But the real show began after that with the second releaseAlexei Shipilev : at the same time he said quite serious things and at the same time he did not let me get bored. In his presentation, the wording (“bloody enterprise”) and pictures (“compressed links” were illustrated with a clasped image of Lenin in exile) amused the audience - but at the same time made it clear what they were talking about, successfully fulfilling their main task. “Assume that most of the time you are wrong,” Shipilev said, and he did not want to object.
Finally, already at the end of the round, the Highload round table was held, and it was noteworthy, starting with the list of participants: Oleg Bunin , organizer of HighLoad ++, the main Russian conference in the field of high loads, and Odnoklassniki , from which Oleg Anastasev was presentand Andrei Pangin - a project in which they know firsthand about such loads. And here, too, despite the hardcore theme, the show turned out. To begin with, the participants discussed what highload is all about - and if this is usually associated with “the site has a lot of visits,” Bunin preferred the definition of “highload about understanding internal processes and optimizing them, if you have a standard CMS, then with any quantity the visits will not be highlod. ” And then they began to answer questions from the audience - and on the fly they sorted out the case of a specific viewer, coming to the conclusion that the problems he described were caused by generally not high loads, his system itself was unreasonably built, and this should be combated.
Perhaps this allowed the conference attendees to finally bring out a lesson, useful not only in the case of highload and Java, but in general in life: when something does not work as it should, you should not blame the "load" hastily, but think about whether it is right originally arranged.
And the conference itself became a kind of life example of a successful highly loaded project. Such a number of spectators, speakers, halls and themes - these are also high loads, which are simply not measured in the number of server requests. And if there are no hiccups, in addition to the line for lunch, the reports are not canceled and they are not knocked out of the schedule, and everything goes as planned, which means that the initial approach turned out to be correct.