This year, I was too late to buy my full week conference pass for Devoxx Belgium. Sales started way earlier than I anticipated, so I had to settle with just a Deep Dive ticket. These are the first two days (November 12 and 13, 2018). To allow myself time to experiment with new technologies, I kept my agenda empty for the next week and a half.

Devoxx Belgium is packed with interesting sessions on various topics. It is visited by over 3000 developers every year. I did meet up with old colleagues and was happy to have a reunion dinner on Monday. Since a couple of years, most sessions are streamed live on YouTube, and you can play them back anytime later, E.g. to see a talk I’ve missed, because I attended another one. Since there are a multitude of talks scheduled simultaneously.

Because of this Devoxx YouTube channel, there is almost no longer a need to actually visit the conference to stay up-to-date with recent developments in my discipline. But attending does give an intense focus for a whole week on acquiring knowledge, which is hard to achieve at home or at the office. Not to mention the opportunity to catch up with old colleagues.

During my Deep Dive, I focussed on subjects that I was likely to use in the short run. So I visited deep dive sessions about Kubernetes, Kotlin and Typescript and some shorter presentations about security and Spring Boot. Once at home, I watched many more videos from this years’ Devoxx and applied the new knowledge to my personal projects, such as the playlist project and another one. Playlists is now fully written in Kotlin running on Spring Boot 🙂

I thoroughly enjoyed my visit and especially the time I took to play around with the material. That is something I can really recommand to every Devoxxian.