JAX 2023

This week in Mainz was JAX 2023 again, organized by Software & Support. It was nice, because slowly the conferences are getting more full, more real again. JAX was also hybrid and the organizers put a lot of effort into streaming all workshops and talks in parallel and connecting visitors at home via chat. But it’s not the same as on-site, sharing, discussing, laughing, eating and drinking.

As I said, the conference consisted of workshops on Monday and Friday, and three days of keynotes, talks and panel discussions from Tuesday through Thursday. These middle three days I was there on site. On Tuesday I arrived very early via train and had a very nice ride along the Rhine, the Deutsches Eck and the Loreley. Around noon, with only 7 minutes delay, I was then on site, met also immediately acquaintances and visited my first Talks.

My contributions

On Tuesday evening, armed with a beer, it was time for me to take to the stage as well. We were five pretty old hands, Nils Hartmann, Michael Inden, Arno Haase, Thorsten Schleinzer and me. Our topic was alternative languages to Java, on that day Typescript, Kotlin, Python, Rust, and Go. The event was very well attended and the audience had a lot of interest. I thought it was a very nice form.

And also on Wednesday I had my own contributions. My topic was, as should be expected, Go again. The first talk in the morning was on Generics in Go. The room was not huge, which was not to be expected for the topic. But it was well occupied, the audience participated well and also had questions. I finished on time after 60 minutes and was very satisfied, thanks to my audience. In the late afternoon I had an equally large room, but because of the fringe topic Cloud Provider APIs it was arguably sparse. Perhaps Kubernetes operator development would have been a better fit. Nevertheless, thanks again to the audience who responded to my questions and interacted with me visually.

The other contributions

Given the variety of topics offered, it’s not surprising that I found what I was looking for. Java topics, however, were fewer; here, the topic was maintenance. Important were the interplay of EDA and RESTful APIs in larger architectures, Domain-Driven Design, software development in the future and responding to AI, architecture for humans, Kubernetes, the technological and cultural shift to larger IT landscapes, and testability. Lots of exciting topics from good speakers. I will look at more via Software & Support’s platform.

Conclusion

Was it worth it? Both from the active and passive aspect? Yes, it was very good again, with a lot of fun as well as a lot of knowledge. And meeting old acquaintances and getting to know new faces was also very nice. I am looking forward to the next JAX.