Devoxx BE 2023

Last week, I had the exhilarating opportunity to attend Devoxx Belgium, where a cascade of talks on Artificial Intelligence unfolded, each offering valuable insights. One presentation, in particular, caught my attention and has left me thoroughly impressed: the demonstration on utilizing Copilot and IntelliJ AI assistance for coding. This AI assistant not only clarified code with admirable ease, serving as an indispensable ally for comprehending legacy code bases but also suggested thoughtful improvements to enhance the code’s overall quality. The chat feature embedded within the IDE made interacting with the AI assistant remarkably straightforward, allowing for an intuitive and engaging user experience. In a live demonstration, the assistant skillfully crafted unit tests, illuminating its potential as a vital tool for both understanding and augmenting existing code. I was particularly thrilled to envision using this advanced technology as a virtual peer programmer, from which I could receive immediate feedback and insightful suggestions for API usage, thereby streamlining and enriching the coding process. With its ability to elucidate and improve code, as well as facilitate the addition of unit tests, I can clearly see this AI assistant becoming an indispensable asset in my daily coding ventures.

The Devoxx Belgium 2023 was an absolutely fantastic experience! There were many interesting talks across every timeslot, making it a challenge to pick just one to attend. Significant attention was given to the recently released Java 21, and rightfully so. Watching Java evolve so fastly is really exciting. The new features were released after preview, such as Sequenced Collections and Record Patterns, and of course Virtual Threads. One of the most interesting talks for me was called, "Closing the Developer Experience Gap of your Container Platforms." Timo Salm delivered a great talk and provided many insights. So, it’s really crucial to understand that the developers' primary focus should be on implementing business logic rather than spending time on configuring infrastructure. Although Kubernetes and Docker are valuable tools, they offer low-level abstractions, which is why having the right expertise is crucial for proper use. To simplify developers' lives, there are platforms designed to address these needs. These platforms take over after the development phase, offering additional features and ensuring security. Timo provided an excellent overview of existing platforms that might be used by everyone. We are already in discussions about which ones could be suitable for our project! I also really enjoyed the talk "Kubernetes: From 0 to Production-Grade with Java" by Kevin Dubois and Alex Soto. The talk and demo was really fun! During the demo, the Quarkus app was being prepared to be delivered to the Kubernetes cluster. And it turned out to be surprisingly simple and straightforward, thanks to Quarkus! During the break I also didn’t miss the opportunity to get the signed book by Alex Soto, GitOps Cookbook: Kubernetes Automation in Practice. I’m eagerly looking forward to reading it and sharing it with my fellow Lunatechies!

Hey, I’m Jeremy, a junior software engineer at Lunatech, and it was my first time attending a Devoxx conference! It was a really great experience. There were many good technical talks, but the one I remember the most is about mentoring. Both Sébastien (my mentor) and I attended the session titled "Empowering Growth: The Art of Harnessing Your Mentor’s Expertise as a Senior Developer." Clearly, I’m not a senior software engineer, but this talk was about how you can use a mentor to progress in your career. With Sébastien being my mentor, I learned a lot about being a good mentee! Because this was feedback from a senior engineer, Sébastien was more interested in the part about how you can use mentoring, even as a senior, to continue progressing in your career. So, this talk was interesting for both of us!