Return of the Joker: how was the main Russian Java conference
A year ago, the first Joker conference was held in St. Petersburg, and a detailed text about it appeared on Habrahabr. Now she has returned on a larger scale, confirming by deed her application for the status of “the main Java conference in Russia”. The organizers, led by Alexei Fedorov (@ 23derevo), called me to evaluate the result of their work. I’ll just say that I’m not a Java programmer, but an IT journalist, so I couldn’t understand all the technical details of the reports — but what I understood was enough for conclusions.
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If for the first time Joker took place in the hotel “Pribaltiyskaya”, now “Park Inn Pulkovskaya” was chosen. She is not the first to host major IT events: for example, a conference on the development and promotion of the mobile games Winter Nights was held here in February, which brought together speakers from companies like Rovio and Warner Brothers.
The program was so intense that three rooms were used at once (on the same Winter Nights, the case was limited to two). And the third, the smallest, was not at all “a place for reports that no one needs”: people often stood there against the wall, because there were more people willing to listen to the report than chairs.
In the case of conferences, sometimes everything that is not directly related to speeches is considered meaningless tinsel. But at the same time, a person working on almost any large project can easily tell how important naming, corporate identity and guidelines are for proper perception. One thing is to be just a set of reports, and another is an event that is isolated from the series and is waiting, knowing that this name already guarantees a high level. And in the case of Joker, this part was on top.
You can already start with the name: Java conferences, not conducted by Oracle itself, must include the letter J in the title, but often this leads to abstract names like Cretan “JCrete” - here a very specific word was chosen that gives the opportunity to beat it, and This feature is used to the fullest. The halls were called “Peaks”, “Trefs” and “Tambourines”, which came received from a branded card deck, in the hall you could be photographed in the image of a card hero - even if it is not directly connected with programming, it will not confuse the event with any other and years later, visitors will remember, “Oh, I heard about this profiler on the Joker.”
After the opening ceremony and keynote from Oleg Anastasyev (“Classmates”), the matter went directly to the reports. One of the highlights of the first day was the presentation by Alexey Shipilev, who works directly at Oracle and has enormous prestige in the Russian Java world. He confidently explained that not any benchmarking is equally useful - and for all the “technical hardcore” his performance on the slides lacked an informal language like “Benchmarks without analysis strongly upset Shipileva”, enlivening the audience and not turning everything into a set of dry instructions.
The combination of seriousness with the absence of tediousness manifested itself in Oleg Anastasyev's report “Beyond NoSQL: NewSQL on Cassandra”: about the situations in which NewSQL may be preferable to MS SQL and NoSQL, it was quite serious, but this did not prevent the speaker from using the corporate Smiley "Classmates" and cause laughter in the audience describing familiar situations ("what to do with BSoD when using MS SQL, they don’t even know at Microsoft, give advice like“ wipe the monitor with a rag ””).
Speaker Sergei Kuksenko (Oracle) at the beginning of his speech drew attention to the disclaimer, which traditionally accompanied the reports of this company (briefly: “things will now be said for general information, Oracle does not take any obligations.” However, this did not mean at all that consisted of common places and water: on the contrary, his report could be described by the word “hard” both because of the subject matter (it was about hardware performance counters, performance counters used in modern processors), and because of tonality. The links listed on the final slide looked google.com/search?q=Hardware+performance+counter - they say, go ahead yourself, not small ones.
After hardcore followed by relaxation: the first day ended with a concise master class on "how to draw a monkey." The resulting drawings could be submitted for participation in the competition.
Obviously, many conference visitors, meeting old acquaintances there, in the evening continued their communication outside of its framework and went to bed not early - therefore, on the second day, everyone needed to be shaken up, and in the morning two points of the program were set aside. The first one is the performance of the “Scientific and Technical Rap” project with songs like “Tyzhprogrammer”: acquaintances to those present in the hall combined realities with a cheerful beat. And then Nikita Dzhigurda appeared on the scene and gave a real performance: he threw cards into the hall (“tell me who pulled out the joker, won a prize”), told stories from life, ran his clips on the screen.
Surely there are those who wish to declare that such a hero is inappropriate at a technical conference. However, no matter how you feel about Nikita Borisovich (the figure is indeed ambiguous), it would be foolish to argue with two things. First of all, he does a wonderful job with the task of “stir up the audience”: going from a lyric to a formidable roar, he wakes up with a voice in a healthy way. And, secondly, among famous Russian figures, the role of the Joker does not suit anyone as he does. That is, that same identity turns out perfectly.
It is not surprising that after the performance of Dzhigurda, a queue of people willing to take a selfie with him lined up in the hall, with which he was only pleased. His loud exclamations of "Self-party!" Were even forced to cover the doors of the main hall, so as not to distract the listeners there.
It was good to listen to that. The first speaker in the main hall was Markus Eiselle (Red Hat), impressed by the performance of Dzhigurda, but quickly got down to business and spoke about the possibilities of Java EE 7. He was replaced by another Markus - Lagergren from Oracle - who spoke about achieving harmony between the Java virtual machine and the operating system in which it is running. Both reports were English-speaking, but the public gathered prepared, and this did not cause problems.
Meanwhile, in the small hall, Svetlana Isakova, involved in the Kotlin project at JetBrains, told “in simple words about type inference”. With the simplicity of the words, her report was very “on the case”, and the slides had mostly strict information — until a crocodile image was added to one of them (“I thought that you would be bored to this place and wonder where Pictures").
But there was definitely no shortage of vivid examples by Mikhail Dudarev (Licel) in a report on difficult places with the security of Java Web containers. One of the slides depicted how using the CSRF (inter-site request forgery) a Khan user with the status “commander” is added to Earth - the allusion is clear to any Star Trek fan. And the subtitle of the final part of "And One More Thing ..." is for anyone familiar with Apple's canonical presentations.
Alexei Ragozin from Deutsche Bank, gathered to talk about data structures in Java, ran into a more prepared audience than he expected (“Raise your hands, who once implemented the hash table ... however!”), But quickly found: “And who implemented such an exotic thing as prefix trees? Oh, so I’ll tell you something new. ” And in another room, the leading developer of Odnoklassniki, Alexei Shevchuk, at this time explained how to solve the problems of high-loaded services: really, who else should speak on this topic if not the site developer with tens of millions of users?
The program was completed in the main hall by Aleksey Shipilev, who had already spoken the day before, but in this case changed Russian into English (the title of the report was “java.lang.String Catechism”). However, he could not do without Russian at all: on one of the slides there was a photo with the caption “There is no science without flour”.
How to understand if the conference was successful? In part, this shows the number of visitors (Joker was fine with him, none of the three halls was empty), and partly their reaction (everything is fine here too: the speakers were accompanied by active applause). But there is an equally important indicator, which is more difficult to assess: which part of what the conference attendees heard is useful to them in practice.
Of course, it’s impossible to say for all visitors, but the example of Alexander Levantovsky, a VK community administrator on the Java community , can be revealing: “Nikita Lipsky from Excelsior in the Ahead-of-time report on the compilation told exactly what I needed - I had already heard about same project, but then it was more raw, and now, judging by the report, is suitable for my tasks. And it is the conference format that allows you to see the internal structure of the project, communicate with the developers and understand how this can be applied. ”
So, it’s not all in vain, and all those interested in Java now have reason to wait for the next Joker. Wait another whole year - but you will not forget such a memorable event for the year.
')
Scene
If for the first time Joker took place in the hotel “Pribaltiyskaya”, now “Park Inn Pulkovskaya” was chosen. She is not the first to host major IT events: for example, a conference on the development and promotion of the mobile games Winter Nights was held here in February, which brought together speakers from companies like Rovio and Warner Brothers.
The program was so intense that three rooms were used at once (on the same Winter Nights, the case was limited to two). And the third, the smallest, was not at all “a place for reports that no one needs”: people often stood there against the wall, because there were more people willing to listen to the report than chairs.
Identity
In the case of conferences, sometimes everything that is not directly related to speeches is considered meaningless tinsel. But at the same time, a person working on almost any large project can easily tell how important naming, corporate identity and guidelines are for proper perception. One thing is to be just a set of reports, and another is an event that is isolated from the series and is waiting, knowing that this name already guarantees a high level. And in the case of Joker, this part was on top.
You can already start with the name: Java conferences, not conducted by Oracle itself, must include the letter J in the title, but often this leads to abstract names like Cretan “JCrete” - here a very specific word was chosen that gives the opportunity to beat it, and This feature is used to the fullest. The halls were called “Peaks”, “Trefs” and “Tambourines”, which came received from a branded card deck, in the hall you could be photographed in the image of a card hero - even if it is not directly connected with programming, it will not confuse the event with any other and years later, visitors will remember, “Oh, I heard about this profiler on the Joker.”
First Day Reports
After the opening ceremony and keynote from Oleg Anastasyev (“Classmates”), the matter went directly to the reports. One of the highlights of the first day was the presentation by Alexey Shipilev, who works directly at Oracle and has enormous prestige in the Russian Java world. He confidently explained that not any benchmarking is equally useful - and for all the “technical hardcore” his performance on the slides lacked an informal language like “Benchmarks without analysis strongly upset Shipileva”, enlivening the audience and not turning everything into a set of dry instructions.
The combination of seriousness with the absence of tediousness manifested itself in Oleg Anastasyev's report “Beyond NoSQL: NewSQL on Cassandra”: about the situations in which NewSQL may be preferable to MS SQL and NoSQL, it was quite serious, but this did not prevent the speaker from using the corporate Smiley "Classmates" and cause laughter in the audience describing familiar situations ("what to do with BSoD when using MS SQL, they don’t even know at Microsoft, give advice like“ wipe the monitor with a rag ””).
Speaker Sergei Kuksenko (Oracle) at the beginning of his speech drew attention to the disclaimer, which traditionally accompanied the reports of this company (briefly: “things will now be said for general information, Oracle does not take any obligations.” However, this did not mean at all that consisted of common places and water: on the contrary, his report could be described by the word “hard” both because of the subject matter (it was about hardware performance counters, performance counters used in modern processors), and because of tonality. The links listed on the final slide looked google.com/search?q=Hardware+performance+counter - they say, go ahead yourself, not small ones.
After hardcore followed by relaxation: the first day ended with a concise master class on "how to draw a monkey." The resulting drawings could be submitted for participation in the competition.
Entertainment
Obviously, many conference visitors, meeting old acquaintances there, in the evening continued their communication outside of its framework and went to bed not early - therefore, on the second day, everyone needed to be shaken up, and in the morning two points of the program were set aside. The first one is the performance of the “Scientific and Technical Rap” project with songs like “Tyzhprogrammer”: acquaintances to those present in the hall combined realities with a cheerful beat. And then Nikita Dzhigurda appeared on the scene and gave a real performance: he threw cards into the hall (“tell me who pulled out the joker, won a prize”), told stories from life, ran his clips on the screen.
Surely there are those who wish to declare that such a hero is inappropriate at a technical conference. However, no matter how you feel about Nikita Borisovich (the figure is indeed ambiguous), it would be foolish to argue with two things. First of all, he does a wonderful job with the task of “stir up the audience”: going from a lyric to a formidable roar, he wakes up with a voice in a healthy way. And, secondly, among famous Russian figures, the role of the Joker does not suit anyone as he does. That is, that same identity turns out perfectly.
It is not surprising that after the performance of Dzhigurda, a queue of people willing to take a selfie with him lined up in the hall, with which he was only pleased. His loud exclamations of "Self-party!" Were even forced to cover the doors of the main hall, so as not to distract the listeners there.
Second day reports
It was good to listen to that. The first speaker in the main hall was Markus Eiselle (Red Hat), impressed by the performance of Dzhigurda, but quickly got down to business and spoke about the possibilities of Java EE 7. He was replaced by another Markus - Lagergren from Oracle - who spoke about achieving harmony between the Java virtual machine and the operating system in which it is running. Both reports were English-speaking, but the public gathered prepared, and this did not cause problems.
Meanwhile, in the small hall, Svetlana Isakova, involved in the Kotlin project at JetBrains, told “in simple words about type inference”. With the simplicity of the words, her report was very “on the case”, and the slides had mostly strict information — until a crocodile image was added to one of them (“I thought that you would be bored to this place and wonder where Pictures").
But there was definitely no shortage of vivid examples by Mikhail Dudarev (Licel) in a report on difficult places with the security of Java Web containers. One of the slides depicted how using the CSRF (inter-site request forgery) a Khan user with the status “commander” is added to Earth - the allusion is clear to any Star Trek fan. And the subtitle of the final part of "And One More Thing ..." is for anyone familiar with Apple's canonical presentations.
Alexei Ragozin from Deutsche Bank, gathered to talk about data structures in Java, ran into a more prepared audience than he expected (“Raise your hands, who once implemented the hash table ... however!”), But quickly found: “And who implemented such an exotic thing as prefix trees? Oh, so I’ll tell you something new. ” And in another room, the leading developer of Odnoklassniki, Alexei Shevchuk, at this time explained how to solve the problems of high-loaded services: really, who else should speak on this topic if not the site developer with tens of millions of users?
The program was completed in the main hall by Aleksey Shipilev, who had already spoken the day before, but in this case changed Russian into English (the title of the report was “java.lang.String Catechism”). However, he could not do without Russian at all: on one of the slides there was a photo with the caption “There is no science without flour”.
Conclusion
How to understand if the conference was successful? In part, this shows the number of visitors (Joker was fine with him, none of the three halls was empty), and partly their reaction (everything is fine here too: the speakers were accompanied by active applause). But there is an equally important indicator, which is more difficult to assess: which part of what the conference attendees heard is useful to them in practice.
Of course, it’s impossible to say for all visitors, but the example of Alexander Levantovsky, a VK community administrator on the Java community , can be revealing: “Nikita Lipsky from Excelsior in the Ahead-of-time report on the compilation told exactly what I needed - I had already heard about same project, but then it was more raw, and now, judging by the report, is suitable for my tasks. And it is the conference format that allows you to see the internal structure of the project, communicate with the developers and understand how this can be applied. ”
So, it’s not all in vain, and all those interested in Java now have reason to wait for the next Joker. Wait another whole year - but you will not forget such a memorable event for the year.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/241816/
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