jProfessionals 3.0 – Java Day with Venkat. How it was.

The latest edition of jProfessionals has happen to be a very special event for BGJUG. Unlike the previous two editions current event was fully dedicated to one special guest – Dr. Venkat Subramaniam! Venkat is an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., creator of agilelearner.com, and an instructional professor at the University of Houston. He has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and is a regularly-invited speaker at several international conferences and a committee member of the JavaOne conference. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with sustainable agile practices on their software projects. Venkat is a (co)author of multiple technical books, including the 2007 Jolt Productivity award winning book Practices of an Agile Developer. During the first part of the day Dr. Venkat Subramaniam gave two talks: Let’s Get Lazy: The Real Power of Streams Twelve Ways to Make Code Suck Less More than 150 developers came from Sofia and other cities. Even our friends from Macedonian JUG came from Skopje! Then we had a small break. The second part of the day was dedicated to a 3 hours workshop about Functional programming with java. The first two who successfully finished the labs have received special awards from our partner JetBrains – 1-year free license for any of their great products. The winners got their prizes: The event was great! Many useful lessons learned! The community was very excited for this java day! And spacial thanks to Dr. Venkat Subramaniam for making it happen! At the end we had our traditional afterparty! Special thanks to Paysafe for providing the most modern...

jProfessionals 2.0 how it was

The second edition of jProfessionals was really huge! jProfessionals is a small one day absolutely free miniconference. We consider it as a smaller daughter of jPrime. It is a good place to see both prominent and newbee speakers, and even try yourself as lecturer. The format is quite agile! We are very pleased that hall was full and stayed like this till the end. All our eventbrite free tickets were “sold”. The Java users are ready for the new knowledge: Ivan Ivanov and Nayden Gochev open event (Richard Warburton is getting ready for his first talk): Richard Warburton, our special guest from LJC kicks-off with the Pragmatic Functional refactoring with Java 8: A truly useful deep dive in Java 8 new features and how to use the effectively. Except “typical” topics regarding Lambdas and Default methods a big attention was payed to the Optional and currying. We then continued with Vladimir Tsanev’s live coding session about Spring REST Docs – a great automated way to create documentation for REST. After some lunch break, the next special guest from LJC Daniel Bryant presented his wonderful session “The Seven deadly sins of microservices“. A truly nice summary of what are microservices useful for and for what they are now. A bunch of god books were given for helping to convince your boss they are suitable or not. Doychin Bondzev then gave a session regarding a less known free Database engine Firebird. Although it’s not that popular it can provide competitive features similar to well known RDBMs like Postgres or MariaDB. Richard Warburton then gave his second talk about “Java Generics: Past, Present and Future” It was not...