Dmitry Alexandrov is a passionate Java developer with 10+ years experience, BGJUG co-lead, big fan of Java EE, blogger, speaker. Speaker at: – Lambdas and default methods in Java 8, Java2Days Sofia, Bulgaria, 2013, slides: on site; – JavaScript on JVM: Acquaintance with Nashorn and Avatar.js, Java2Days Sofia, Bulgaria, 2014, slides: on site; – Java(Script) on JVM, Joker Conference St. Petersburg, Russia, 2015, slides: http://www.slideshare.net/dalexandrov/javascript-on-jvm-54679017; – Seminars, Hackathons, Adopt OpenJDK, Big Conference: The Story of Our JUG [BOF3150], JavaOne, San Francisco, USA, 2015 – Nashorn extended session, JUG.ru, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2016; – JBatch.. or not such a big data, Joker Conference, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2016, slides: http://www.slideshare.net/dalexandrov/jbatch-67221346 Leaded several lectures and hand-ons regarding JDK development and Lambdas in the local JUG. http://www.tomitribe.com/blog/2016/03/developing-batch-applications-with-tomee/ https://blogs.oracle.com/nashorn/entry/using_nashorn_with_intellij

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

My session is called “Think Async in Java 8”. As the Java 8 was released the main innovation in it that grabbed the most of the attention were the lambdas, streams and default methods. But there was another thing that somehow passed by almost silently – the CompletableFuture. It’s just one class but in many cases it can be a total game changer.

Q. Why is the subject matter important?

In modern hardware the most of the utilization can be achieved with an extensive use of parallel algorithms. But parallel programming is hard and often a non-trivial task. With the CompletableFuture there is a real possibility to achieve a better use of the hardware resources in a really simpler and less error prone way.

Q. Who should attend your session?

I believe this session may be interesting for all of the java developers. Especially for the API designers.

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

I have tried to make this session not as just a technology tutorial but also to provoke a little bit different way of thinking. From my experience I see that the designs with this approach are really more robust and flexible. So I hope it would be useful!

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

The year has just begun and in our local community – the Bulgarian Java User Group – we have already started with some great workshops and meetups. The plans for this year are huge: even more meetups, master classes, big local conference jPrime.io and many many more!

Márton  is a romanian Google Developer Expert (GDE) senior software architect at REEA/Tîrgu Mures who led the implementation of complex and distributed systems serving millions of users for companies like LogoMix, WaterSmart, Ausschreibungsdienste and many more. Among the top romanian StackOverflow users with over 103k reputation points. Active contributor for open-source solutions like Beanstalkd admin console, and Riak admin interface. Expert in Databases and Search system like Google BigQuery, Elasticsearch, Sphinx.

Q. You’re speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest in March. Tell us a bit about your session.
Every scientist who needs big data analytics to save millions of lives should have that power. Complex interactive Big Data analytics solutions require massive architecture, and Know-How to build a fast real-time computing system. BigQuery solves this problem by enabling super-fast, SQL-like queries against petabytes of data using the processing power of Google’s infrastructure. We will cover its core features and several use cases for everyday developer.

Q. Why is the subject matter important?
Implementing reporting and analytics in projects is always a complex task. We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. With BigData movement there have been developed tools and services that make it easy for even the simplest projects to get advantage of awesome systems that power and let us run complex interactive analytics. A lot of projects are built around one database, but in an era of abundant storage keeping a copy of data in a reporting system is better suited for large scale analytics. Having such a system like BigQuery at our hand we can simply run all sorts of interactive analytics and power Business Intelligence with low costs and no engineering efforts.

Q. Who should attend your session?
As a developer or arhitect you will find insight how to run SQL queries against petabytes of data, taking data from a legacy RDBMS, and how to ingest in BigQuery. As a data scientist or CTO you will learn about the BigData features of BigQuery, how can query decades of data in a blink, and never worry about maintenance or engineering efforts. If you are an analysts you will see how to query large amount of data without developer assistance, use tools like Tableau, or Data Studio to build awesome reports.

Q. What are the key things attendees will take away from your session?
You will understand how flexible and easy is to add a managed service into your current project. After the session you will be able to integrate BigQuery into your projects, by adding streaming inserts or load jobs. Once the data is in BigQuery you will be able to run SQL reports, leverage the capabilities of the system to solve BigData problems.

Q. Aside from speaking at Voxxed Days Bucharest, what else are you excited about for 2017?
Machine Learning is getting more and more coverage. Now with Google’s Tensorflow open source framework for machine intelligence, or Cloud ML there are tools that are available for everyday developers to run predictive analytics. Recommendation engines are the past but the future is about Machine Learning and companies are reaching us to build their next project around this technologies.

Vlad Mihalcea is a Hibernate Developer Advocate. He spoke at Devoxx France, Voxxed Days Bucharest, JavaZone. This is a list of presentations that he’s been giving in 2016: https://vladmihalcea.com/presentations/

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

My session, High-Performance Hibernate, is about getting the most out of your favorite JPA provider.

Q. Why is the subject matter important?

Hibernate is undoubtedly the most popular data access framework in Java, yet, it’s not always used as it should. The biggest problem with any relational database framework is that it requires you to know a lot of database-specific details, which are not very well-known by Java developers. In this session, I’d like to present which Hibernate features you should use, and which ones you should avoid when developing a high-performance enterprise application.

Q. Who should attend your session?

This session is aimed for any Java developer or architect who’s ever used Hibernate before. Therefore, it’s very useful for junior and senior developers alike since I cover both basic, as well as some advanced topics in this presentation.

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

After this presentation, when you get back to work, you can start reviewing your JPA code and immediately be able to spot places which could be optimized. I’m going to present many tips and tricks, many of which have never been shown in the same light as I like to present them.

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

Although I can’t speak at many events, I really wanted to participate at Voxxed Days Zürich and Bucharest, as well as Craft Conf Budapest. Apart from these three conferences, I’m going to run my High-Performance Java Persistence workshop (https://vladmihalcea.com/trainings/) for companies that want to run their data access layer at warp speed. While in 2016 I managed to publish the High-Performance Java Persistence book (https://leanpub.com/high-performance-java-persistence), in 2017 I want to bring some updates, which eventually will materialize in the second edition, so stay tuned!

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…