I’ve attended this year’s qCon conference in London. qCon defines itself as vendor-independent and targets mainly senior software developers. This was my fifth year and again it was worth attending.
The conference lasted three days. Each day had seven parallel tracks focusing on a specific topic. The sessions were not just the normal presentations and panels. So-called “Open Spaces” used the unconference format so any attendee could raise a topic and discuss it with other participants.
I can say from the presentations and talks I visited that microservices are still a hot topic. It seems the hype is starting to decrease as they become a normal architectural paradigm.
The same was true for Docker. Last year I found myself among quite a few people using Docker in production. That seems like the norm nowadays. Still, it is quite astonishing how quickly Docker became a mainstream technology.
New on the agenda was Blockchain. It and the technologies, including Bitcoin, that depend on it were popular topics.
qCon covered other highly interesting topics like team culture, distributed systems, performance, and more.
You can find more details on the presentations here:
My personal top 3 presentations were:
- Rob Witoff: Crushing Tech Debt Through Automation at Coinbase
- Elaine Ou: Blockchain Introduction: Peering Through the Hype
- Trisha Gee: Real World Java 9
