eXo at Devoxx France 2013: Follow-up and Takeaways

As previously announced, several eXoers joined Devoxx France between 27th and 29th March.

The conference started Wednesday and was dedicated to CRaSH for Julien and Alain with two events.

In the afternoon the hackergarten took place and our team was there for recruiting contributors for CRaSH, at least for the duration of the hackergarten. CRaSH is a great project for such events because it is powerful yet embraces simplicity:

simple to explain: people get the concept quickly
simple to use: running the standalone crash.sh turns anyone into a user
simple to contribute: creating a new command and attaching to a remote JVM turns you into a contributor.

This made CRaSH quite popular among the attendees and it received five contributions:

Thomas and Romain contributed to the SSH connector by allowing the execution of commands without an interactive session (for example ssh admin@host execute some script).
Frederic Bouquet and Vincent Massol integrated CRaSH in XWiki turning any wiki page into a potential command. Special kudos to the duo as they spent more than the hackergarten time on it until it was finished on Friday.
Xavier Hanin contributed to the thread command and provided a completer implementation for thread ids.
Damien Rieu, a regular contributor, fixed the ANSI color issue on Windows.
Henri Gomez improved the startup script crash.sh.

After the hackergarten it was time for the tools in action session. The room was full and the Devoxx folks had to deny access to a few people who wanted to get it. There were mixed feelings because it is sad to turn people away, but a full room makes your ego bigger. The talk went fine as usual and no obvious bugs happened during the session.

The session was also a good opportunity for us to release:

CRaSH 1.2.0 after a few months of hard work (get it from the site)
CRaSH Socialthat allows you to develop, use and share commands online.

This first day ended with a funny puzzler about Apache Maven presented by Arnaud and his regular partner Nicolas De loof (a few years ago they wrote a book in French about it). To put on an amazing show, the puzzler was animated like the TV game “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”. Nicolas questioned Arnaud about various strange or known bad behaviors of the tool (reactor, dependency management, …). Do you think that with the help of his 3 jokers (50/50, ask a friend, audience vote) Arnaud took up the challenge?

Photo by Alexis Morelle

During the next two days, it was time to continue the conference, but now as attendees! It was also time for the conferences to begin. The first impression was that the conference was packed, both during the pauses between the sessions and also in some of the conference sessions themselves, long before they started. Nevertheless we were able to attend some very interesting ones:

We enjoyed the Tugdual Graal and David Pilato session about NoSQL and Elastic Search. The level was high both in demo and talk-ability, pretty much the same level as the Angular.JS session of Devoxx last year.
Bodil Stokke gave a session on functional programming. It was not our first time with Bodil as we attended her Coffeescript session a couple of years ago. A great session as usual.
Our CRaSH hackergarten contributor Vincent Massol gave a session full of practical advices to follow for implementing quality in Java project. Among other things, he provided a lot of useful tips for avoiding Jenkins false positives.
The bright Remi Forax evangelized his vision for the JVM for the next 10 years for the purpose of Java EE: adapt the JVM to the EE world to deliver lightweight dynamic middleware.
As Groovy fans we naturally went to the statically typed Groovy DSL session given by Guillaume Laforge and Cédric Champeau: there was plenty advices about Groovy meta programming!

The conference ended with a live recording of the LesCastCodeurs podcast. It was an opportunity to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the podcast and to sum up what had happened during the conference. Can you have imagine, for a three-day conference of 1,400 attendees you need to supply 1,000 liters of coffee, 9,000 cans, 25,000 snacks?!

Photo by Ludovic Poitou

Like last year, we really enjoyed this french edition of Devoxx conference and we are really proud to have contributed to it. We enjoyed meeting many interesting people and exchanging our point of view about the IT of yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Brahim Jaouane

I am a Digital Marketing specialist specialized in SEO at eXo Platform. Passionate about new technologies and Digital Marketing. With 10 years' experience, I support companies in their digital communication strategies and implement the tools necessary for their success. My approach combines the use of different traffic acquisition levers and an optimization of the user experience to convert visitors into customers. After various digital experiences in communication agencies as well as in B2B company, I have a wide range of skills and I am able to manage the digital marketing strategy of small and medium-sized companies.