Devoxx 2017

Almost two months ago I visited Devoxx 2017. It’s about time to write some notes on the stuff I learnt there!

Event Storming & DDD workshop

The week started off with a full afternoon workshop led by Stijn Vanpoucke. The workshop consisted of small pieces of theory, alternated with exercises using post-it’s and markers.

A few of the theoretic pieces:

Kotlin for Java programmers

This year had a lot of talks about Kotlin scheduled. To visit them all would take too much time, so I decided to follow just one by Venkat Subramaniam. I figured it would give me about the same amount of content…

Kotlin is a statically typed language that runs on the JVM. Source code can be compiled to include the Kotlin runtime, so there is no additional runtime dependency left. Invoking kotlinc without any arguments give you an REPL (Read–Eval–Print Loop).

Declaring variables or method arguments have a slightly different syntax: numberOfThings: Int. This might look strange, but there is an idea behind it. The name of a variable is more important than its type.

A lot of other Kotlin things made me think of Scala:

Building apps with React Native

On Tuesday afternoon, I gave a deep dive myself. The topic was React Native, with a deep intro into React itself. To me, understanding React is crucial for working with React Native. Apart from the theoretical parts, I did some live coding. To that, I had two physical devices, my own Android phone and a borrowed iPhone. It was definitely fun to present at Devoxx and see the stage from another perspective.

For those who missed it, the recording is on YouTube.