Monthly Archives: October 2018

[2018 oracle code one] skill developers need to design career

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The One Skill Developers Need to Design their Careers and Break the Career Plateau

Speaker: Bruno “Javaman” Souza & Rodrigo Moutinho

@brjavaman and @rcmoutinho

For more blog posts, see The Oracle Code One table of contents

For junior developers (less than three years)

  • Most important is to do things
  • If you don’t “do”, you don’t learn
  • Can’t just read about programming
  • Hard skills are precise. Do same way every time. Ex: typing, IDE shortcuts, Java language itself.
  • Soft skills vary every time use them. Development is a soft skill. Rely on pattern recognition. Different each time. Speaking is a soft skill too.

For mid (3-10 years)

  • “grow without doing anything”. People give you things to do and you grow by doing them.
  • 2/3 developers think easy to get a job equivalent to one have right now
  • Don’t typically worry about career at this point.
  • Sometimes get stuck though. ex: job without opportunities to learn

Career plateau (10+ years)

This was most of the audience.

  • Not bad. Means grew a lot.
  • Now have to figure out what next.
  • Don’t get discouraged that nothing happens for a few years
  • Different for ever person
  • We get comfortable and then realize something is wrong. So being comfortable becomes uncomfortable

Audience concerns

  • Team uses legacy technology
  • Not going to be marketable
  • Got stuck doing something very good at, but how do something new
  • Not growing for several years
  • Complacency
  • Take charge of career (vs having something happen to you)
  • Be recognized (control how people see you)
  • Don’t feel comfortable working with someone don’t trust
  • Want to to be a manager/architect (when manager, dev skills atrophy(
  • Don’t have opportunity
  • Be relevant
  • Stay on tech side without becoming a manager
  • Discomfort on how to break through plateau

“You don’t die, but your brain thinks you will” – getting over fear of speaking/teaching

  • Asked who was shy/scared of speaking in front of people. Then dragged one up on stage. Had a conversation with him up there and then him talk about a comfortable topic (what like about java) while looking at audience. Asked if could teach a student about Java. He said it was hard initially but got used to it.
  • Then asked a second person to try. That person knew what was coming. This time, he emphasized looking at the audience as they spoke. Had audience intentionally ask a hard question. He did a good job saying would research and get back on it.
  • All know enough to teach someone something. All don’t know enough to teach a different topic.
  • People come to a presentation for a topic they want to learn about.
  • Ok to recover after make a mistake

Know what want

  • Often feel uncomfortable because don’t have new objectives. Think big.
  • Need to know what want. Might have already achieved it.
  • Infinite amount of things to learn. Will never get to 100% of knowledge.
  • Know what want overall in life; not just about tech

Share what know

  • Learning how to share is a skill common across everyone
  • Testimonial from Rodrigo
  • Helping enough other people helps you
  • ex: you are stuck doing legacy code because nobody else knows what you do. or why new tech is important [seems oversimplified; maybe because ran out of time?]

My take: I like that they covered a lot of information before doing the intros. I also like that they tied the session to the audience. It was interesting hearing all the audience concerns/questions. Hearing the variety of problems and hearing your own is helpful. Even if it is “just” for dealing with imposter syndrome :). I think he could have spent a tiny bit less time on audience interaction and finished.

[2018 oracle code one] wednesday keynote

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Wednesday keynote

For more blog posts, see The Oracle Code One table of contents

IBM

Pratik Patel & Mary Grygleski. And John Duiovich & Tim Ellison (An four people from the community)

  • #callforcode. Disaster prep code.
  • Cloud is reality whether public cloud or in house cloud
  • Eclipse foundation community – Jakarta EE and Microprofile
  • starting to do more polyglot environments in cloud native; puts more pressure on JVM
  • challenges – varied programming models, dynamic environment, cloud economics (paying for resources used)
  • opportunities – acss to powerful services, devops integration, responsive behavior
  • J9 VM is open source (Open J9)
  • Next level – JVM itself becomes a cloud service
  • Demo of remote JIT service on two laptops (JIT compilation in the cloud)
  • Adopt OpenJDK
    • started Adopt a JSR when London Java Community started on EC
    • Looked at how to make easier to build OpenJDK
    • Build farm to crank out many different versions of Java
    • Aiming to support OpenJDK LTS releases for 4 years
  • Brought up all BM speakers. A lot of people! Threw socks at audience. One guy ran down the aisle so they made it more than aa few rows back.

Groundbreakers Avengers

  • Roles in skit
    • Dr Strange
    • Average developer
    • Thano Duke is villain – popping little kid balloons
    • JUG leaders as superheros. Two have masks so don’t kow who are. One has a Groot puppet!
    • Un conference forces! Said unconference rules
  • Did shout outs by country. Brazil was quiet. Asia was quiet. The   US was quieter than it should have been. The build up to the Netherlands orange shirt folks was great. Loud and in front.
  • Plot: need to find infinity stones. Had hidden objects under chairs
  • Un conference people brought out beer on stage. Had a “stone planning” session. Listed random acronyms and patterns
  • Got dig in about the lack of beer at ignite
  • Silly programming whiteboard exercise using tech buzzwords to see how any balls can fit in a schoolbus Good pun on bus!
  • A bunch of jokes about uploading the stones with different technologies
  • Used Java beyond the cloud to get Thanos Duke from outer space/orbit
  • Brought out Duke in costume on stage along with handler! Duke waddles so the speed is hillarious!

[2018 oracle code one] emerging languages bowl

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Emerging Languages Bowl

Speaker: Trisha Gee (JetBrains) and Eugene Petrenko (JetBrains) – moderated by Raghavan “Rags” Srinivas

For more blog posts, see The Oracle Code One table of contents

Rags talked about how this is a different format than the usual “script bowl”. I’ve never been so not disappointed

Java (Trisha)

  • Inspired features from scripting languages
    • Lambdas
    • Streams – would be hard to use without lambdas because would need anonymous inner classes
    • RPEL
    • var
  • Not a functional language, but idioms that came from functional languages
  • Not in Java
    • Immutable “var” – do you use var/val, var/let, var/final var? We have “final var”, but it isn’t immutable. Just prevents re-assignment. But are getting immutable collections.
  • Future
    • data classes [records]- Kotlin has this. Preview feature in Java 12
    • multi-line strings – Groovy has this.
    • Switch statements/pattern matching. Preview feature as well
  • Preview features are a good thing because can discuss with real code

Kotlin (Eugene)

  • Statically typed
  • Now official on Android
  • Concise – minimal boilerplate
  • Safe – avoid classes of errors like null pointers
  • Interoperable – use JVM and Android libraries
  • Tool friendly – works with any Java IDE
  • Can combine Java and Kotlin in same module
  • Kotlin invented in 2000. Version 1 came out in 2005
  • Can target Java 1.6 (or higher if want)

“The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it” -Dennis Richie

IntelliJ has plugin which gives sample tasks

Kotlin demo

  • fun main() {} – function – defaults to void return type
  • fun main() : ReturnType {} – function with return type. Can use generics in types
  • “Hello ${abc}” – string interpolation
  • Triple quotes – multi line string
  • trimIndent() – extra method
  • var/val – mutable/immutable
  • var x : String – not nullable
  • var x : String? – nullable
  • if ( x is Type) – auto casts inside if statement
  • fun Class.method() = impl – add method from outside class. It can even use instance variables from inside the class.
  • sealed class – all subclasses must be defined in same file
  • when/is – pattern matching

My take: I don’t know what the session was supposed to be, but this was fine. It was 10 minutes of Trisha and Eugene introducing Kotlin for 30. I have seen the intro to Kotlin talk before though. That said, I still needed Google for what one thing did.