Attending Devoxx France for the first time, I feel fortunate that my employer is a sponsor, allowing me to request a badge for entry to this exclusive tech event. While not grasping every detail, I am eager to seize this opportunity, immerse myself in the vibrant atmosphere, and connect with fellow enthusiastic developers from diverse backgrounds. 🌟
Day 1
Keynote session
The keynote is something you should not miss out on because it will be presented by some influencers or even big stars in the industry.
So the day one keynote is held by Jean-Emmanuel Bibault who studies Artificial Intelligence for Medicine. He answered one question from attendees that humans would gradually lose the expertise if we only let the machines do the medical operations, and hence build some irreversible dependence. He agrees and explains that some pre-operation analysis would need a human to work for two hours while a machine can do it in two minutes 🤖, so it's logical we would depend on machines more and more. That's the reason he thought that young professionals should still need to be educated in some advanced practices.
Conferences
I planned to watch the "Hands on Gemini, the Google Deep Mind LLM", but it was full when I arrived at the room, so I went to "Confidentialité des données sur Kafka ou Pulsar", which I didn't regret at all after listening to it. Guillaume DUFRENE has explained and presented a few solutions to handle the data transfer security between producer and consumer when using Confluent Kafka, he showed how the data has been encrypted in code and displayed in Redpanda 😊, which reminds me of my daily job.
The next conference that I went to was the "Sécurité du GenAI & des LLM : Une nouvelle ère d’Hacking éthique", presented by Katarzyna KAPUSTA and her team, I heard an opinion that human beings are not ready yet for Artificial Intelligence to be used everywhere, there are a lot of regulations and configurations (preparation, filter, defense) to be done first. But what and how? So I think this talk has answered some of these questions.
The last one is "Une application résiliente, dans un monde partiellement dégradé", presented by Pascal MARTIN, he introduced some concepts about application resilience, for example, partially unavailable is better than totally non-functional. Use a “Random jitter” to solve the problem that a cache has only a limited life while the application should have high availability. I like his way of presenting the concept by using these animated drawing slides, clear and stylish 😎 to help me remember.
Day 2
Keynote Session
Mark RENDLE was here to talk about some "small" mistakes people had made but which had cost a lot of money in history: "Programming’s Greatest Mistakes", there were a lot of laughs 😆 in the room, and I found the content on Youtube by himself.
Conferences
At first, I went to Kevin DAVIN's "GatewayAPI, 10 ans de maturation pour une nouvelle API Kubernetes", he introduced some ideas about the flexibility of this new API, how easy it is to help developers configure their applications for some load balancing, parallel routing in between different namespaces. I found similar content on YouTube by Google Open Source.
Then I went to "Java rencontre l’IA : Comment intégrer les LLMs dans vos applications avec LangChain4j", by Lize RAES. She has demonstrated some example code from Github, with a lot of explanations, which I believe would encourage the audiences to have a try.
I also went to Daniel GARNIER-MOIROUX and Josh Long's talk "Password-less apps: implementing WebAuthN", so they demonstrated how to authenticate with biometric ways to a website, here is a video with the same content, and the GitHub demo code. Daniel is a particular speaker that I wanted to meet, I like his way of presenting things, just so relaxed and well organized. I did some study projects thanks to his YouTube videos, and when I was desperately ˆˆ learning polymer for my first job, his blog greatly helped me. I was so excited to see him in real.
The phenomenal talk show of the year would be "Debugguez votre salaire ! Mes stratégies gagnantes pour réussir sa négociation salariale" from Shirley ALMOSNI CHICHE, you can see from her talk that she is a great person with a lot of wisdom, empathy, and humor, she gives us some pragmatic advice about how to negotiate a salary. N+ego means no ego, well done Shirley 👏👏👏!
The last one of the day is from Jean-Philippe BACONNAIS and Lise Guesnel, they have presented "Renovate/Dependabot, ou comment reprendre le contrôle sur la mise à jour de ses dépendances", when I was watching this show I was thinking that these good practices have been used in my work already, how lucky I'm! Jean-Philippe and Lise have created much dynamic vibe ⚡ for this demonstration, which would attract a lot of newcomers to their team.
Day 3
Keynote Session
Beginning with young influencer Anatole CHOUARD, for "Comment modéliser l’état du monde en 2100 ? Le Rapport Meadows", the topic has created some buzz on the internet about urging people to take action to protect the environment 🔥.
Conferences
Julien Topçu and Josian Chevalier are from Shodo, they have brought the subject "Model Mitosis : ne plus se tromper entre les microservices et le monolithe", they demonstrated how teamwork discussion is built and how the decision is made to separate the dependencies for each service. Another good practice that we also have in our project!
Another conference that I have attended is from Arnaud Pichery and Aurélien Coquard, for "Comment ça marche l’IA Generative ? LLM, RAG sous le capot", I have got some general concepts of how things work together, I also read this article and got a better idea for MidJourney diffusion.
Last but not least one is from Patrycja WEGRZYNOWICZ, for "Beyond the Pod: Privilege Escalation in Kubernetes", she has demonstrated lively in an interactive way with us showing how a pod without much protection can be attacked by malicious hackers, "Hey, Dog, congratulations! You are attacked!", so much fun 👍 ! Here is an article about the same concept.
I have attended some other talks, but the above ones are which had impressed me the most. It's not easy to hold a good conference because both the subject and the way to present things are important, sometimes the "how" is more important than the "what".
I had discussed with some interesting people on the stands and had much fun in this experience, look at all the goodies that I've collected 💯.
That's all, thanks for reading😎!