Reasons why I go to Devoxx

Yet another year is almost over. One of the reasons I notice this is because Devoxx is coming up again. And – of course – Synyx is going to be there. In the last year four of Synyx’ employees attended the full conference. This year all of last years visitors are going again, and even three more. So there has to be a reason why it’s so popular. This post is going to be about Devoxx and why I personally enjoy going there. Well… there are several reasons…
A big challenge in our business is staying up to date. There are plenty of books, articles, tweets and blogs to read in order know what is going on in the world of software development. And there are even more things to filter out and forget (at least for a while) because they don’t apply to you and your daily work. Sometimes you just don’t have enough time for this because you already have loads of work with current technologies in your day-to-day work.
The talks at Devoxx keep me in sync with what is going on and what is (probably) important. It has pre-selected talks with relevance to Java or me as a Java developer / architect.
Considering last year’s Devoxx there were many things that came to our knowledge and are in use at Synyx now. Some affected the ways we work at Synyx (Hello, Neal Ford), some the tools, libraries and frameworks we are using now (e. g. Wicket) and some simply increased our knowledge and brought us up to date (like the “what’s new in” JPA, Spring or Java talks). Go see the stuff you can easily use in your daily work.
In addition to the interesting topics of the talk you just have to look at the Cast. There are many well-known speakers which have great experience with their topics and also know, how to present it to the audience. So it’s almost always a pleasure to listen and learn from them because they are the best.
Another big thing that makes me really looking forward to next week is that I’ll spend a nice week in Antwerp with so many of my co-workers and other friends. I’m looking forward visiting Kelly’s Irish Pub again, which is about 100m down the street from our hotel and has been our conference-table almost every evening/night last year (and probably will be again this year).
And the last thing why I’m going there is optimism: As I requested in my last post about the conference they made the tickets more expensive this year. So I hope they made this because they followed my suggestion to serve better coffee this time :). Be sure, Synyx will report about it…