Two Java boots: how did JBreak and JPoint 2017 go

The Novosibirsk conference JBreak and the Moscow JPoint are two pair of boots: both are held in the spring, both are held by JUG.ru, both are the main Java conferences of their region. And this year we did them all in one week (and even survived after this). Therefore, the stories of “how it went” for JBreak and JPoint decided to merge into one, let's say, “breakpoint”. Under the cut - the details of both Novosibirsk and Moscow.

The same event happened with both conferences this year: a change of platform. In Novosibirsk, a year ago it became clear that they would have to look for a bigger place, and the large-scale Expocentre became one. And the JPoint, which continues to grow, this time took place at the ITC Congress Center.


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Signs appeared in the programs of both conferences, which help to understand which audience the report is intended for: “Introduction to Technology”, “For Practicing Engineers”, “Hardcore” and “Get Ready, Will Burn”. Of course, these designations immediately gave rise to a break through discussions and disputes. Is the correct designation chosen for each report? Is the classification correct in general? And which would be more correct?

But although it is hardly possible to come up with an option that suits everyone, and “the report is labeled incorrectly” are inevitable, the system as a whole helps to reduce the number of situations, “came to the report and did not understand” and “craved hardcore, but told for beginners.”



Also in both cases, we decided to improve the online support: promptly post high-quality images on Twitter and VKontakte, create via Telegram chat for JPoint and for JBreak . JPoint also got an “upgraded” online broadcast: in between the presentations, when the viewers usually had nothing to do, this time they showed interviews with speakers and reportage photography. According to the results of all these online activities, one of the viewers of the broadcast wrote in the same Telegram-chat “As if you are at the conference” - it means it turned out.

At JPoint, due to the abundance of company stands (Sberbank Technologies, GridGain, Odnoklassniki, Alpha Laboratory, Deutsche Bank and not only), some kind of action connected with them constantly happened: here Deutsche Bank holds its own mini-performances, but speakers Baruh Sadogursky and Yevgeny Borisov "fight" at the Zalando stand, where you can take off the gif.


And what about the main thing for which everyone gathered - reports? The programs of the two conferences partially overlapped, but both cities had “exclusives” (especially at JPoint, where there are simply more reports due to two days). About all the speeches do not tell, take a look at some memorable moments:

Even somehow boring to write, but a new report by Alexey Shipilev (Red Hat) about the Shenandoah garbage collector was a great success in both cities. No intrigue! But more often in our life the words “no intrigue” would mean “everything is delighted again”. After Shipilev referred to The Garbage Collection Handbook as the main book about GC, some listeners decided to take it, including Speaker Tagir lany Valeev and our own director Alex 23derevo Fedorov .



In addition to the technical details of the GC-algorithms, the report was remembered by many with the phrase “to find trash, you must think like trash”. At the time of his slot, Alexei burned out the information field so much that they remembered him even in another hall (even if with the comment “we do not calculate simple standard deviations”).

Sasha Goldstein (Sela Group), the author of Pro .NET Performance, is no stranger to applause at .NET conferences. But now, unexpectedly for many, he spoke at the JPoint - and from javistes he also received very high marks. How is it possible at the first attempt to conquer "foreign territory"? It was probably helped by the fact that the object of his attention was the BPF Linux tool that helps in monitoring Java applications: as Sasha told us in an interview, Linux tools initially interested him by themselves, and Java simply became a convenient point of application, because .NET in Linux so far sparsely.



It is curious that immediately after his report, Sasha was even more deeply involved in Java. Interested in the presentation of Andrey apangin Pangin and Vadim Tsesko (Odnoklassniki) about the intricacies of the work of Java-profilers, he immediately began contributing to Pangin profiler on GitHub, without even waiting for the end of the conference:


In a review of a report by Charles Natter (Red Hat) about String, the Novosibirsk people complained that the introductory theoretical part about codings is too long. Indeed, Natter, who lives in a country with the Latin alphabet, may not be obvious that Russian programmers, because of the Cyrillic alphabet, already know about the encodings firsthand. But this long introduction had the most useful way in Moscow, where the Charles report had problems with the projector. He was able to tell the theoretical part without slides, and then the technician started working exactly by the time he went over to the joni and jcodings libraries , and it was necessary to show code samples on the screen. As a result, the projector that earned time tore off so much applause, as if he were the speaker.



Tagir Valeev (JetBrains), who talked about IDEA inspections in both cities, began with a frank confession, “The usefulness of my report is dubious” - but this didn’t stop many people to listen with great interest to the opportunity to improve their code with one click in the IDE. If you don’t think about it, it may seem like a simple mechanical job of replacing some structures with others, but the report showed how wrong it is.

Variations of the same design, which must be able to recognize, can be many ("even John Skeet would not parse this reg exp"). Even when it seems superfluous (“it turns out, in this case map.getOrDefault and map.putIfAbsent act differently, although both appeared in Java 8,” need to be read into the nuances of documentation). At the same time, the documentation may be incomplete (“well, on Stack Overflow, I did find the answer about it, but talking about the interface, tomorrow there will be a new implementation, we’ll start breaking code for people with IDEA, and I’ll show you the link to Stack Overflow ? "). And there are a lot of unobvious moments like the need to save and place comments in the “right place” when the code changes (“Where is the dust from the table? Important phones were written there!”)



And besides, the practical benefits in this case could be extracted thanks to the discussion zones, where the speakers after their reports gave detailed answers to those who wished. Surely many developers have questions related to IDEA - and here was a convenient opportunity to ask many of them. As a result, Tagir, after the conference, began to work on correcting the bug that was shown to him right at the JPoint. Just in case, let us clarify: this does not mean that the conference is the official channel for receiving bugs, for this you still have YouTrack!

Nikita Lipsky (Excelsior) was present at both conferences, but with very different topics: in Moscow he talked about bytecode verification, and in his native Novosibirsk, he gathered a full audience hall with the report "Java 9 Modules: Why Not OSGi?".



It would seem that a report with this title should be very short - it’s enough to repeat Mark Reinhold ’s words that using OSGi it is possible to divide the project into modules, but only with the help of Jigsaw you can “cut” the JDK itself. What can be added to this? It turned out a lot of things. “OSGi’s activation system for bundles is a time bomb: if the JVM starts resolving links less lazily, OSGi applications simply stop working,” Nikita explained to his fellow countrymen, and the more he talked about OSGi, the more attractive Jigsaw began to look. And a separate achivka Lipsky can be given for the overall liveliness of the performance: the report, where Kharms is quoted at the beginning, the mantras are performed in the middle with the audience, and in the end, “Childbirth is inevitable” cannot be boring.

Another speaker with different topics was Yegor yegor256 Bugaenko : in Novosibirsk he talked about Utility-classes, and in Moscow about annotations. Knowing Yegor, it is easy to guess that he mercilessly criticized both phenomena, and, of course, both of his reports had “Get ready, will burn” icons. In the presentation at the JPoint, he even managed to include feedback received from the listeners of the report on JBreak: “The author is a maniac”, “Egor in his repertoire: all Honduras, and I am D'Artagnan”.



Last year, when discussing the “OOP of the Future” with Yegor, Baruch jbaruch Sadogursky noticed that the “five slides, and now let's chop” format is provocative to Bougaienko ’s provocative speeches: and make immediately debatable. In this case, this was done - and most actively at JPoint, Baruch himself chopped up with Yegor, defending the benefit of annotations. Meanwhile, Aleksey Shipilev left the hall, then came back, regularly changing his face. We are not going to decipher exactly his emotions about what was happening, but we feel that they were strong.

In Novosibirsk, Kirill Tolkachev (Alfa Laboratories) talked about the Spring Boot Test rakes alone, and in Moscow he was joined by Yevgeny Borisov (Naya Technologies). Also, Eugene made a separate report on the nuances of Spring - and the largest conference hall turned out to be full of people. The brightest audience review, perhaps, is: “After such reports, I get the feeling that the logic of Spring can be understood.”



From Sberbank Technologies, which became the general sponsor of both conferences, there were several speakers at once with completely different topics - from architectural solutions in working on the platform to creating a DSL-language for charging. Which of the reports is more useful - to judge the audience, but the greatest excitement in the hall clearly caused a speech about Oleg olegchir Devirp Oleg Chirukhin . His wording like “Since we are at a Java conference, everyone understands how to beat the admin” clearly showed that working in a giant company does not automatically mean boredom and “buttoning on all buttons.”



It was curious with Kotlin : a few days before the JPoint, a technical preview of Kotlin / Native suddenly came out, and as a result, Andrei abreslav Breslav ’s words about language movement towards multiplatformity were supported by a fresh concrete step in that direction. Looking around the hall, Andrew noticed that there must be a lot of “embedded in C” around - and this means a potential market for native-solutions. And they asked from the audience about the possible support of WebAssembly, and Breslav compared the current state of the wasm with a bunker, from where it was impossible to get through to anything: that, when the project has normal access to the DOM, then we can talk about its support.

In general, the usual “past” at the JPoint and JBreak “meat” was enough. Did any of them have something unique in the program that might never come in handy, but it will be remembered forever? Perhaps, for the JPoint audience, the keyout of the popularizer of mathematics, Alexey Savvateev, about game theory, became such.



At the JUG.ru conferences, keyouts often move far away from the main subject, giving the opportunity to "switch the brain" (for example, Yevgenia Timonova , known for her video blog about animals, spoke at the JPoint past). But in this case, it turned out to be an interesting “intermediate” version: although the subject of Savvateev’s lectures does not apply to Java, it is close to many javists — right up to this:


As a result, examples of how to deal with violations using tricky rules were listened to with enormous interest. Recognizing, for example, that even the situation “a bribe can be bigger than a fine for it” is not so obviously losing to inspectors as it seems at first glance. It turns out that if one reports that checks will only take place with large bribes and small ones “will pass under the radar”, the second option may turn out to be more attractive for bribe takers, reducing the size of bribes by several times.

We have everything on this - but besides us, the participants also turned out to be active and wrote a lot themselves:

• JPoint 2017. Day 1
• JPoint 2017. Day 2
• jpoint in hot pursuit. Part 0 of N: the beginning.
• jpoint in hot pursuit. Part 1 of N: the banquet and its continuation.
• Performance is a holiday (habrapost vladimir_dolzhenko )

And finally - the photo "Baruh Sadogursky strokes a fluffy microphone":