This is a “live” blog from day 1 at Devoxx 2011, we will be updating this blog post during the day. You can read all three blogs by following the links below

Day one
Day two
Day three

Day zero

17.00 - Everybody is excited about going to the conference. We just have to commit our last changes and we're off to Antwerp!
19:30 - Checked-in at our Hotel and on our way for some delicious beers
?? - Back at our hotel...

Day one

We made it, got our badges and ready for the keynote. There are a stunning 3350 attendees at the tenth anniversary edition of Devoxx, which was sold out one month in advance. They even had to book an extra room to fit all these people! They found a solution for all these people next year, it's called Devoxx Paris. Just get rid of the French.

By the way, if you are one of the people that couldn't be here; check out Parleys.com for the live stream.

Oracle did the second and third part of the keynote this year. Unfortunately the presentations did not meet up with our expectations! No new information and too much sales. A disappointment for all the Java developers using a Mac, JDK7 will be a year late and be officially launched at 2012. But at least they are working on it.

Play 2.0

We are always interested in the ongoing improvements of web frameworks, therefore we attended the session about the Play 2.0 framework. Play 2.0 is still in beta and under heavy development. It looks like it has some serious potential, it's typesafe, lightweight (only 2MB heap), gives a performance boost (40.000 requests per second, without any optimizations, at least according to them...).

It's build in Scala, therefore has a strong focus on Scala developers. Although they gave some examples on how to use it in Java, but we don't feel it's the solution for us. It tries to assist in all area's, from the data layer to front-end, which means we have to adapt a lot to fit in Play's structure.

Diabolical developer

Martijn Verburg gave a very interesting point of view on they way we currently seem to work. Currently we do not focus on programming itself, but on all the additional things like choosing;

• Agile techniques
• Best practices
• Tooling
• Frameworks
• ...

Back in the day when they put people on the moon, they didn't seem to need it. The question rises, "are we better programmers now?". Martijn's opinion is we aren't. We are too distracted reading other peoples code, blogs, going to conferences. Food for thought? Or is it time to code!?

Continuous delivery

At Avisi we looking at new ways to deliver our software. David Farley helped us in the "correct" direction with his talk about the way a full-grown project could be managed and brought to production through continuous delivery. Developing software is done for users and in his session he tried to explain how to find the shortest path for software from development to the hands of the users.

We're used to build something and bring it to production when we think we're ready for it.
David turned this up-side-down by saying we should always try to bring everything immediately to a point where a user could start working with it.

"Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software."

We should test every commit to find a reason why software couldn't be brought to production. Software can only not be brought to production when a step in the build pipeline fails. In all other cases, it is ready for production.

In order to do the above test cases should be very thourough. Also testcases and deployments should all be automated, because human error is the most common error.

We are definitely going to buy his book!

HTML5 sessions

Both Google and Microsoft had a HTML5 presentation at the same time. We attended both and noticed that there was a lot of interest for this topic. Both sessions showed mainly new features. The Google session was more technical and the Microsoft gave useful information about everything related to web standards.

Most of the new HTML5 features can already be used, even in IE!

Other sessions

Short summaries of the other sessions we attended the first day will be posted later this week!