JVM memories from Confitura 2019
It’s not a rocket science? Isn’t it? Or is it? 😉 So far, for 12 years, Confitura community consistently doesn’t let us down making the conference a go-to place each season.
This year the event gathered almost 2k attendees, an excellent lineup of speakers, plenty of attractions and dozens companies eager to open their doors to a witty newcomers.
As we already have started our grand 10th birthday celebration at SoftwareMill (yesss, more to come, join us here!) supporting and attending Confitura was a no-brainer.
A walk down the memory lane
Confitura is one of the biggest JVM conferences in Poland. It evolved to such a successful event, because of a strong Java community in Warsaw. Time flies, the community grows, let’s recall events, people and places that had (some still have) a huge impact on the crowd we are today.
The nostalgic look and feel of Javarsovia remains consistent in our hearts and the JVM community run deep in our veins.
A bunch of Fun Facts for Confitura fans!
- the original name of Confitura is Javarsovia, held for the first time in 2007 (here is the announcement).
- the name Confitura was the result of the community voting and was proposed by Łukasz Żuchowski.
- the name changed, because Oracle bought Sun along with the rights to the name “Java”.
- the name for the after party SPOINA was invented by Jacek Laskowski.
- the acronym SPOINA means “SPOtkanie Integracyjne” (eng. Integration Meeting).
- for many years, Confitura has been held at the University of Warsaw before it moved to EXPO XXI.
We also asked Jacek Laskowski (founder of Confitura, which at that time was called Javarsovia) to help us uncover even more secrets from the origins of the event. Did you know all of these?
- Before we opted for a single event, we had been hosting Warsjawa (Java workshops) and for many years there was a spring edition of Javarsovia and Warsjawa in the autumn. The events were founded by sponsors and Eclipse Foundation (Eclipse DemoCamp).
- Łukasz Lenart (The Boss @Confiturapl) was once living and working from Warsaw — then he joined SoftwareMill, used the opportunity to work remotely and relocated to a city near Polish mountains. He was the co-creator of WJUG’s and its meetups’ success. Other prominent names from the WJUG were: Tomek Szymański, Paweł Wrzeszcz, Bolesław Dawidowicz and Michał Margiel.
- Javart was a long-time sponsor of WJUGa, later was rebranded to Javeo, to finally disappear from the market.
- Other long-time sponsor — javatech — also had to change it’s name from the same reasons that Javarsovia and Javart did (yes, Oracles acquisition of Java).
- Javarsovia was sponsored by Sun Microsystems Polska which was awesome because they were the “Polish Java company”.
- “Wed, Dec 3, 2008, 12:25 AM” Łukasz Lenart wrote an email titled: “Javarsovia 2009” that said: “Sure someone will write that there is still time, but what do you think of doing a two-day conference?“
- Before Warszawa JUG started we formed a “Polish BEA User Group” (2005!). And in 2005 I asked MIMUW — University of Warsaw, Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics (dean Krzysztof Diks) to allow us to hold the meetups on their premises.
- The name Javarsovia appeared for the first time in the email: “Here is the name for our conference” to jug@googlegroups.com and the first one who responded with approval was Tomek Szymański (check out here).
Meet the team that makes the Confitura awesome for years to come!
Dev Highlights from our Team
Kasper Kondzielski — @kkondzielski
One of the talks I liked best was “GitOps — How to marry Git and Kubernetes for implementation and maintenance” given by Marcin Jasion (slides available here). First he introduced us to the topic of gitOps, to later show its practical use with ArgoCD. I chose this presentation because I strongly support keeping the configuration in the git repository myself. I think that it is very important to promote good practices in this relatively new kubernetes world.
Secondly, you can’t walk away indifferent when Jarek Ratajski has a presentation, can you? This time he talked about the abuse of Spring magic, in particular the @Inject annotation, which he appointed as a today’s Go-To method. Based on his own experience, Jarek explained what such abuse can lead to in a larger project and what are the hidden costs associated with it. Interestingly, Scala programmers have noticed this problem some time ago already and are not afraid of using the ‘main’ function and creating new objects through ‘new’.
Wojciech Dobrzański— https://github.com/wdobrzanski
Maciej Prochniak’s talk “Being transactional in 2019 — what does this actually mean” was, in my opinion, the most thought-provoking presentation this year. Even though data systems have been around for many years, Maciej showed that there are still a lot of misconceptions about their behavior and that the industry is full of somewhat vague marketing terms. The key takeaway from this talk is to never blindly believe marketing buzzwords and to always strive to understand what happens under the hood.
Sławomir Kowalski—@KowalskiSlawek
I joined Jarek Ratajski’s presentation about overusing certain frameworks when starting a new project. He showed us a few examples based on Spring and Jakarta EE on how several framework functionalities cause degraded code readability and maintainability. Jarek explained that it is much better to replace frameworks with libraries or at least use frameworks only in HTTP layer.
Other presentation I really enjoyed was “Top Performance Challenges in Distributed Architectures”. Andreas Grabner explained how improper microservice architecture can lead to issues with performance, using a few samples of how to detect such issues with request tracking tools.
Michał Mital — @MichalMital
This year at Confitura I was responsible for our Wheel of JVM Fortune contest so I didn’t have many opportunities to take part in the talks. All I wanted was to take part in Jarek Ratajski’s talk: “Spring, Jakarta EE, CDI and other pathologies”. As we all know Jarek is a very experienced developer, used to work with all of these frameworks and wanted to share his experience with us. As always he started with some historical background like GO-TO instructions. He explained why someone created a given instruction and why people used it before and thought it was a helpful and performant. Then he showed us why it is not a good instruction. If you’ve ever taken part in Jarek’s talks you can expect a funny, entertaining and above all, very informative presentation. To animate the audience Jarek brought red umbrellas to the stage. You could get one and all you had to do was to ask or answer questions. We could learn what was the reason behind creating such libraries and specifications like Spring, Jakarta EE and CDI. Definitely Confitura is a great event for people with different levels of experience and I’m pretty sure I’ll be there next year!
Our Marta Mielcarek was a speaker — @MartaMielcarekk
IT studies and close cooperation with programmers have taught her that it is best to spread UX knowledge through practical examples. Therefore her presentation was based on a lot of good and bad practices, most often visible on websites and in mobile applications. The attendees walked away with insights on how to create good user interfaces, reminded that small changes can really do a great job!
Couldn’t attend Confitura 2019? Worry not, all the talks will appear on their YouTube channel.
What we enjoyed most about the conference
The people and the atmosphere. That’s consistent each year. Kudos to all organisers, among the event team there are our SoftwareMill-ers: Ida Bzowska & Łukasz Lenart.
Shout out to friends we’re always happy to meet on various events: Bartek Zdanowski, Jarek Ratajski, Jacek Laskowski, Andrzej Grzesik, Michał Gruca, Kuba Nabrdalik, Kuba Marchwicki, Marcin Gadamer, Marcin Grzejszczak, Adam Chudzik.
During the event we showcased our OSS projects (tAPIr, sttp and more) and tweaked a little our Wheel of Fortune game that premiered on Scala Days, so the attendees could challenge themselves with a fresh set of JVM programming and JVM community questions. During the game we had loads of fun, but the thing we enjoyed the most was a chance to talk to the developers. Huge congratulations to the winner of the JVM Wheel of Fortune contest who came back home with the Nintendo Switch.
Because it’s our birthday, we’ve prepared special #PartyParrot t-shirts which turned out to be quite popular among developers visiting our booth. If you missed your chance to grab one, you still can get the t-shirt even though the conference season is almost over. We decided to extend our Call for Songs to “LET IT CODE — programmers selection playlist” until 31st of July. Submissions we like the most will be awarded a Party Parrot tee — find the details in the link below:
We’re celebrating 10 anniversary soon and the music you send us will be played at our Big Community Party in Spring 2020. Get invites to the event here: https://10birthday.softwaremill.com/
We already know we’re joining the next Confitura!
How about you? Save the date!
