Mark Paluch is a Software Craftsman working as Spring Data Engineer at Pivotal and lettuce Redis driver Project Lead. He is a member of the CDI 2.0 expert group and passionate about open source software.

Q. You’re speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest in March. Tell us a bit about your session.

I’m glad you’re asking. I’m very excited to talk about reactive data access with Spring explaining our understanding of reactive systems. My session covers key aspects of today’s data access and explains how data access relates to scalability. I will talk about how reactive data access is different and what to expect from that when using reactive infrastructure.

Q. Why is the subject matter important?

Before we had microservices, we were used to one big application running on a server alone. Microservices head towards splitting the big application into a couple of small applications. So you run multiple applications on the same boxes you had before. Some of these applications need to communicate with each other. Today’s programming models don’t allow using resources in the best possible way. Also, running more applications on the same hardware means that you share resources and you hit scalability bounds faster than before. Reactive systems gain importance here. They handle existing resources much more efficiently. Your application gets more throughput, takes a functional approach and improves resource handling by applying a reactive programming model.

Q. Who should attend your session?

Reactive programming comes with some level of complexity. My talk expects you’re familiar with the notion of reactive programming, you ideally took a look at Project Reactor or RxJava. And you’re interested in NoSQL data access.

Q. What are the key things attendees will take away from your session?

Participants will learn how reactive data access is different from today’s’ synchronous data access. They will take away starting points fore reactive data access with Spring Data 2.0 and Spring Framework 5.0 and learn about the reactive data store support. I’ll also cover why reactive isn’t the ultimate programming model for every application.

Q. Aside from speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest, what else are you excited about for 2017?

I’m excited to see how things evolve in the reactive space. We’ll release Spring Framework 5 and Spring Data 2.0 later this year. We seek for reactive support with other data stores, and I expect further development on that side. On my personal side, we’re building a new house for our family. The construction site experience is as exciting as doing software projects.

Dan Serban is s a data engineer who occasionally teaches advanced data engineering workshops using Spark as the big data framework.

Q. You’re speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest in March. Tell us a bit about your session.

This is the same 100% hands-on Spark workshop that I have been leading in one form or another for a variety of audiences for the past 3 years, in the city of Bucharest.

Q. Why is the subject matter important?

Nowadays streaming data is everywhere and there is an increasing push towards using the same platform for both stream ingestion and machine learning at scale. Apache Spark is an interesting study in how to build a modern streaming data pipeline by making it very straightforward to productionize the work of data scientists.

Q. Who should attend your session?

This workshop is going to be very interesting for any data engineer or data scientist who is not yet familiar with Spark. It will be especially useful for people currently running Hadoop clusters who are evaluating a transition to Apache Spark.

Q. What are the key things attendees will take away from your session?

First, we’ll take a quick look at the small subset of Scala that is absolutely necessary to understand before writing a Spark big data application. Using Spark, we’ll then work our way through a few publicly available datasets and gradually harness increasingly useful insights from them. Towards the end, we’ll examine a relatively complex Kafka-Spark-Cassandra streaming pipeline that more closely mimicks a real-life high-load production setting.

Q. Aside from speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest, what else are you excited about for 2017?

Compared to last year, it’s very exciting to finally see organizations express interest in streaming architectures in 2017.

Andres Almiray is a Java/Groovy developer and a Java Champion with more than 17 years of experience in software design and development. He has been involved in web and desktop application development since the early days of Java. Andres is a true believer in open source and has participated on popular projects like Groovy, Griffon, and DbUnit, as well as starting his own projects (Json-lib, EZMorph, GraphicsBuilder, JideBuilder). Founding member of the Griffon framework and Hackergarten community event.

Q. You’re speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest in March. Tell us a bit about your session.

The session is titled “Java libraries you can’t afford to miss”. The motivation for this talk is to showcase a set of libraries that can be put to good use on a daily basis, be it for creating production code, testing code, or both. This talk reflects on the experience I’ve gathered across the years by participating in both open source and customer projects.

Q. Why is the subject matter important?

The Java Ecosystem is huge. There are libraries for pretty much everything. There’s no need to constantly reinvent the wheel in order to deliver that feature you’ve been asked for by your customers. All the libraries covered in this talk are open source and can be put to work with most projects right away.

Q. Who should attend your session?

All Java developers that would like to learn how to get better results by leveraging open source libraries.

Q. What are the key things attendees will take away from your session?

I’ve to say that the combination of libraries for both production and testing should give attendees a good feeling of what can be accomplished without having to build most code from the ground up. Also, all the code shown on the talk is available as open source, ready to be tested and studied by everyone.

Q. Aside from speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest, what else are you excited about for 2017?

I’m very excited about Voxxed Bucharest because I’m always on the lookout to learn new things. I’m also excited about future Hackergarten (http://hackergarten.net/) events that may pop up somewhere around the world. Finally I’m excited about the upcoming Griffon (http://griffon-framework.org/) releases we’ll have this year. Fun times.

Rafał Leszko is a Java developer at Google. Trainer and speaker at international conferences (Devoxx Morocco, Voxxed Days Thessaloniki). In the past he worked in a number of companies and scientific organizations: CERN, AGH University, Luxoft and more. His roles varied from a team lead, trainer, PhD researcher to developer, but one thing remains unchanged: he loves to be as active as possible, looks for challenges and has a lot of creative ideas (he was the one to introduce the Luxoft Lunch & Learn initiative).

Q. You’re speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest in March. Tell us a bit about your session

I will speak about the mutation testing, which is a method to check the quality of your tests. It is more and more often used and there is a reason for that. After the session, you will be able to start using it straight away!

Q. Why is the subject matter important?

Tests check the quality of the production code, but what checks the quality of the tests? Trust me or not, but I used to work for the investment banking industry in a big project where a lot of unit tests had no assertions (!). And yes… the coverage was very high.

Q. Who should attend your session?

Developers. And everyone who cares about the software quality.

Q. What are the key things attendees will take away from your session?

Why NASA Climate Orbiter broke in 1998? And why CERN started to use mutation testing in their process? What is mutation testing and how I can start using it right away!

Q. Aside from speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest, what else are you excited about for 2017?

A lot! I’m writing a book about the Continuous Delivery process it will be published this year. And, on more personal note, I’m waiting for my first child to be born!

Anibal started as “C” and “Cobol” developer in 1998 and mainly working in the financial sector. In April 2000, he joined the Deutsche Bank group as Java developer and, during last 17 years, Anibal owned several roles: IT infrastructure architect, Innovation “evangelist”, solution architect, project manager and, currently, digital lead engineer.

Q. You’re speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest in March. Tell us a bit about your session.

The main objective of my speech is to share with the audience a real experience, my personal one, as former developer in the financial sector. Share some interesting food for thought about challenges and the opportunity I found during my last 17 years in this area and few years back in the retail sector. I sincerely hope that, by doing so, I can also start offline discussions, maybe during the networking session or through socials so, in turn, I can learn from the audience new solutions or possible alternative approaches.

Q. Why is the subject matter important?

I guess that, in the past, the financial services sector was not so attractive for, what I call, “digital” developers. In reality, this industry is becoming more and more “digital” in term of tools, solutions and also organization. Developers can really play a central role here to steer this transformation.

Q. Who should attend your session?

People with different skills can attend it. Also skilled developers without experience on the overall bank IT landscape can find it interesting. Or this is what I hope!

Q. What are the key things attendees will take away from your session?

As I wrote, I’ll share my experience. Nothing good or bad, just an experience that started as a Cobol developer in mainframe based environment and evolved to become lead engineer for the digital transformation. I hope that someone will find it interesting and, moreover, will reconsider banks under a different perspective. The huge number of fintechs coupled with increasing investments made by banks in the digital world are demonstrating that this can be the right place to be, to apply forefront technologies to the emerging business models.

Q. Aside from speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest, what else are you excited about for 2017?

I believe this and next year will be quite challenging but also full of opportunities for talented developers which aim to create disruptive experience thanks to the new upcoming digital channels such as bot, AI and so on. But this might be a topic for a new interesting edition of Voxxed days…

Kai Waehner works as Technical Evangelist at TIBCO. Kai’s main area of expertise lies within the fields of Big Data, Analytics, Machine Learning, Integration, SOA, Microservices, BPM, Cloud, Java EE and Enterprise Architecture Management. He is regular speaker at international IT conferences such as JavaOne, ApacheCon or OOP, writes articles for professional journals, and shares his experiences with new technologies on his blog (www.kai-waehner.de/blog). Find more details and references (presentations, articles, blog posts) on his website: www.kai-waehner.de

Q. You’re speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest in March. Tell us a bit about your session.

I will talk about the challenges of IoT integration. You have to interconnect small devices or sensors which have very low computing power, latency issues and other problems. However, IoT only works if different devices can communicate with with each other (and other backend / cloud services). Integration is key to make IoT successful. This is also very relevant at the edge where the devices are located. This session will discuss and demo several open source frameworks for IoT integration at the edge to ingest, integrate, orchestrate and control devices. Examples: Apache Nifi, StreamSets, Eclipe IoT, NodeRED, Flogo.

Q. Why is the subject matter important?

We will have billions of devices and sensors to integrate in the next years. Without integration, IoT cannot be successful. If analysts are right, you will have to spend around 50% of time and money on building IoT apps and logic, and the other 50% on integration of these apps with their environment. Therefore, every IoT developer will face IoT integration.

Q. Who should attend your session?

Developers, architects and project leads who are interested in IoT, integration, open source frameworks.

Q. What are the key things attendees will take away from your session?

Key Take-Aways for the attendees:
· The growing IoT industry and and billions of edge devices have to be integrated with agile, flexible frameworks and tools
· See how to build very lightweight microservices for IoT edge integration
· Comparison of very lightweight open source frameworks where writing source code is just an option, but not necessarily needed in many scenarios due to zero-coding web IDEs
· Get a feeling of these frameworks in some “live coding demos” where technologies such as MQTT or WebSockets are integrated
· Understand the relation of these open source frameworks to other IoT offerings on the market such as SaaS IoT offerings (e.g. AWS IoT) or big data and streaming analytics platforms5.

Q. Aside from speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest, what else are you excited about for 2017?

There are a few cutting edge concepts and technologies which will see a lot of traction and market adoption in 2017: Internet of Things, Machine Learning / Deep Learning, Blockchain. We will see exciting new use cases about these topics. The digital transformation is just getting started.

Nicola Ferraro is a senior software engineer at Red Hat. I’m an Apache Camel committer and a contributor of the Fabric8 project, a microservice development platform based on Docker and Kubernetes. I’ve a long background on Big Data systems, having built applications based on Spark, HBase, Kafka and Hadoop for years. I’m also the author of some open source projects related to Big Data application development.

Q. You’re speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest in March. Tell us a bit about your session.

My talk will explore the history of Big Data systems and modern application development trends, with special focus on DevOps, Docker and container orchestration with Kubernetes. Containerizing Big Data applications is a hard task, but I’ll show how this can be achieved and what benefits it can bring at architectural and software development level. I’ll also show some running examples during the talk.

Q. Why is the subject matter important?

Machine learning techniques have always been considered an “addon” in the context of application development. Recent improvements in distributed algorithms and neural networks are increasing the trust we put in these techniques. They will become soon a fundamental part of our applications, so we should stop sketching python scripts on a notepad to “see what happens” and start taking machine learning seriously from an engineering point of view.

Q. Who should attend your session?

Software developers and engineers who want to have a overview about how Big Data frameworks will fit into their software stack, as well as developers with Big Data expertise who want to look outside their platform of choice, to see some of the options expected in the near future. Also, anyone interested in Docker and Kubernetes can find some inspiration.

Q. What are the key things attendees will take away from your session?

Continuous integration, continuous delivery and DevOps practices are changing the way we develop applications today. The benefits brought by these techniques can be extended to all kind of applications, including software for IoT and machine learning at scale. Containers and infrastructure as code are the key elements for achieving this goal.

Q. Aside from speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest, what else are you excited about for 2017?

Kubernetes is making the hit and you’ll find a lot more talks about it in 2017. It might become soon a standard for cloud application development. In Red Hat, we are building a lot of services on top of Kubernetes and Openshift, that is the enterprise version of Kubernetes. Some of them are really futuristic…

Markus Winand teaches efficient SQL. He covers both aspects: the development time to accomplish a task using SQL as well as the runtime of the final solution. He also published the book “SQL Performance Explained“ and is currently working on his next book, which is being published on an ongoing basis at http://modern-sql.com/

Q. You’re speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest in March. Tell us a bit about your session.

My session is about all the good things that were added to SQL in the past 25 years, but hardly anyone noticed. And that’s a lot: 130 named features to be precise. I’ll showcase the most useful ones.

Q. Why is the subject matter important?

SQL is one of the most common programming languages at all. Even NoSQL vendors are adding rudimentary SQL capabilities to their systems nowadays. If you are dealing with databases, you must know SQL. Yet many developers believe SQL-92 is still the latest release and use SQL like 25 years ago.

Q. Who should attend your session?

My session is for developers and architects coping with databases. Even if you are sucessfully using a NoSQL system, I guess you should at least know where SQL is today.

Q.What are the key things attendees will take away from your session?

You’ll get better solutions to common problems. The whole session is based on common use-cases and compares their legacy SQL solution to the modern SQL solution.

Q. Aside from speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest, what else are you excited about for 2017?

I’m really excited about the 2016 release of the SQL standard—I’ll briefly cover one of the new features introduced: row pattern recognition. Besides that, I’m so happy that the next major releases of MySQL and MariaDB will support window functions—of course, I’ll explain them in my session.

Patroklos Papapetrou is a chief software architect, addicted to software quality and an agile team leader with almost 20 years of experience in software development. He believes and invests in people and team spirit seeking quality excellence. He’s one of the authors of SonarQube in action book and he recently founded his own consulting and training company. He’s an occasional speaker giving talks about clean code, code quality, software gardening and other cool stuff he wants to share with fellow developers

 

Q. You’re speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest in March. Tell us a bit about your session.

 

Like I usually do, I pick topics and sessions based on my day-to-day job and tasks. During the last months I have reviewed a lot of code and I have discussed with many developers about their code. Some times reviews didn’t go as expected. I learned many things the hard way and I would like to share my experience with fellow developers how it feels to review code and how difficult it is to earn other colleague’s respect. I will discuss more than the basics, what made me better reviewer and how to deal with developers psychology.

 

Q. Why is the subject matter important?

 

Code reviews is an essential practice that all development teams should embrace. I’m not sure however if more than 50% of development teams do actually code reviews, and from this 50% how many of the teams are doing professional code reviews. People hate code reviews because either they find it boring (as reviewers) or they don’t want to be judged (as developers being reviewed). Who wants to read code instead of working on a new and sexy JS framework? Who wants to have his issues exposed and revealed to a code review system that anyone can look at? I will try to explain how to overcome those fears and how to make core reviews a productive and fun activity.

 

Q. Who should attend your session?

 

Developers, developers, developers. It doesn’t matter if they already do code reviews or not. Anyone can get something from this talk and contribute also with their experience.

 

Q. What are the key things attendees will take away from your session?

 

Attendees will understand the importance of code reviews, the essential automation tools to help then being productive, how to prepare themselves before reviewing code. We will also discuss about setting objective standards and learn a few but important aspects developers psychology and how deal with different kind of developers while reviewing their code.

 

Q. Aside from speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest, what else are you excited about for 2017?

 

Well, it happens to be the organizer of another two Voxxed events in Athens and Thessaloniki so I would like that I’m not excited about both. Especially the first edition of Voxxed Days Athens is something I’m really looking forward because we have invited some amazing speakers including Douglas Crockford

Reactive Programming – A novel programming paradigm

Adrian Punga is a Coding & learning new technologies enthusiast. Enjoyes working in product oriented software companies. A pragmatical technical leader with a lot of experience in people, project and product management within the software industry. Has held different leading roles in his career as: Lead Programmer, Development Director, Managing Director, Head of Product Development, Head of Technology & Backend Development. Now he shares his experience in a tech environment as CTO for EveryMatrix Client Sites Division.

Reactive programming has recently gained popularity as a paradigm that is well-suited for developing event-driven and interactive applications.It raises the level of abstraction of the code so developers can focus on the interdependence of events that define the business logic, rather than having to constantly fiddle with a large amount of implementation details.