This time I made it to Malaga, Spain!

I attended J on the Beach 2017 conference, a Big Data event targeting developers and DevOps communities. It was held over 3 days.

The first day was about workshops. In the morning session, I participated in “Building Microservices on DS/OS” ensured by Jorg  Schad where I got an idea about containers, Mesos, Clusters. It was a little bit difficult for me as all of them were new.


The Afternoon session was  “Hands on Elastic Stack 5.3”. The presenters Pablo Musa and David Pilato were very helpful and I liked so much combining discovering these tools with practice, as I believe that the best way to motivate people about learning something, is by showing results!

I discovered how it’s possible with Elasticsearch to get results of a search query over very large dataset in milliseconds. Elasticsearch has unique capabilities thanks to its indexation process.  Not only can you process a query rapidly, but also you can visualize and explore your query results easily with Kibana! Those where the parts, I most enjoyed, apart from Logstash and Filebeat.

The second day was the conference opening day and it started BIG! Eric Ladizinsky presented to us the evolution of Quantum Computers.

Eric justified weak machine learning binary classification and how quantum can make machine truly intelligent by enabling Probabilistic Machine Learning. More about Quantum age can be found in D-Wave company website.

Various sessions were held after that. The schedule was partitioned by field of interest and level to ensure there is food for everyone’s mind.

As my interest in machine learning couldn’t take down the one for Java, I was excited to attend “Real World Java 9” talk, by Trisha Gee. And I wasn’t the only one! The room was full!

Trisha started by mentioning that Java 9 is still not stable but that it’s a very promising version with its new features! She did her presentation with Live coding (Oh, Yesss!) where she tried the new Flow API and Streams API. More about her presentation here.

If we speak about BIG Data, then for sure there is a subject not to miss: Performance.

Rob Harrop presented a session about “designing and running performance experiments”. It was an interesting session! Rob emphasized that wait times are A THING. Wait times are drawn from a distribution and if you don’t know the distribution, exponential is a good fallback.

James Allerton spoke about how to develop, deploy and iterate often using Oracle management API. And as concretization is always a better way to convince, he demonstrated with a live demo!

Day one last session was about “Dynamic data visualization”. Santiago Ortiz created the link between human intelligent learning capabilities and machine learning created models (classification, labeling, prediction). Trying out things with his children, like classification, made him conclude that understanding human perception and cognition is instrumental in creating environments in which models, machines, and humans collaborate.

Before heading to day two, I like to mention one other thing: Oracle IOT digital demo. Fascinating! Isn’t it?

I couldn’t resume the first day with enough words, it was such a great one! Especially, when it ended with something related to women in tech (obviously, as I’m proudly one of them 😀 )

Carmel Hassan presented to us the visualization of collected data from JOTB17 day one in a way that showcases diversity facts. Surprisingly, the number of women attendees decreased between last year and this year from 13% to approximately 10%! While women are not well represented “live”, they tend to have greater percent “online” according to the data collected from the interaction with JOTB17 publications. Well, it seems that there is still a lot of work to be done in the context of women in tech! But no worry, superwomen heroes are there! Check Yes We Tech community if you want to support!

Here we are! Now, day 3.

To me, what marked the conference day 2 most is “Distributed Sagas” session by Caitie McCaffrey.  Distributed Saga is a collection of requests and compensating requests that represent a single business level action. It makes building microservices easier because it allows putting different services like for example renting a car, booking a hotel reservation and booking a flight ticket all together before proceeding to payment action (one payment action for the three of them). Caitie presentation really added value to my knowledge on distributed services. Her presentation can be found here.

Otherwise, for Elasticsearch users, here is an advice from Pablo Musa: Do not Overshard (Don’t just keep default settings).

So, that was about J on the beach event! But was it all? Where is the fun part?

Well, I didn’t want to mention all the fun at first, otherwise, tears will take place for those who missed it! 😀

We had a lot of fun! Spanish Omlette, Paella, JOTB Afterparty, nice organizing people and Malaga who welcomed us with its beautiful weather!

I would like to finish this article with something that I cherish much. I googled it in order to find a quote about and I think that this one describes it well:

” The richest people in the world look for and build Networks. Everyone else looks for work.” Robert Kiyosaki

The World may seem big for some people, but not for me! The World is little and magical! I got to meet new friends from Ireland, Spain, Russia, Italy! We discussed many topics together, we discovered each other countries culture! We ate ice cream :D. (One of my friends will recognize himself :p by the why of ice cream) and Yeah, of course, laughed a lot!

Thank you all and see you next time!

Note: You can find more about other sessions by using #JOTB17 tag on Twitter!

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