JFall is back!

JFall is the biggest Java conference in the Netherlands organized by the Dutch Java User Group and usually hosted in Ede. It was a great experience to be there with our Xebia team and to attend the live conference again. In this short article I would like to share some of the important takeaways from this event. 

After all the events and talks online, I could tell that people were missing the in-person event. So many people came there to experience live conference again after all that time, I think it was even more crowded than in 2019. The quality of the talks was really high and I personally enjoyed every talk I attended.  

Did you ever imagine your daily work without possibility to see the screen? I was impressed, but this is possible. Blind people can be talented developers too and they manage being productive using voiceover and the hotkeys. In one of the talks we could all experience this too. The big takeaway here is that you should take care of the readability of your code so it’s easy for everyone to understand what it does with the quick glance. Also, the hotkeys are your big friend for the speed benefit.  

Another important topic was related to our cognitive biases and how it often stops us from making good decisions when we design and build software in a team. The talk was presented by our Xebia colleague Kenny Baas-Schwegler and he shared some useful tips.  

Of course, it’s a Java conference and there were a lot of deeply technical Java (among others) topics as well. It’s really nice when people find some weird use cases and share this curious knowledge with others. It’s also cool when they tell about some nice approaches. For example, I have also learned about the CDC and Debezium (it’s open source, potential to contribute) as an approach to build a well-maintained cache.   

Our colleague Jeroen Rosenberg was talking about Hexagonal Architecture and how helpful it can be to reduce dependencies on external systems and design your software with easily applying best practices.  

I have even learned more about learning! It’s important to have the clear goals, not overload yourself or distract with irrelevant things and importantly, reflect. Why did you abandon that project in your GitHub repository? There might be important takeaways from this.  

I wish I could be in several talks at the same time! There were also a lot of interesting sessions that I had to miss, but they’re all recorded, so if you haven’t been there, you can see them too. 

To conclude, it was a high quality conference with lots of important topics, networking, fun, inspiration and sharing. It’s super nice to see our Xebia colleagues presenting at the stage, great job! And I really loved our Xebia team spirit, proud being part of it! 🙂  

Thanks NLJUG for organizing it and looking forward to the next one!