10/17/2022
in Insides
Java Forum Nord 2022 – Open Source, Agility, Java, and much more.
Table of Contents
This year we were again at the Java Forum Nord in Hannover at the Congress Centrum and supported it again as a silver sponsor. Like last year, the event was held under certain Covid restrictions, to ensure safety. At this point a big praise to the organizers for the good organization.
30 lectures, 9 slots, 4 rooms and 33 speakers
With 30 talks on the topics of continuing education, open source, cross-team ensembling, maintainability of systems, Java, agility and UI automation, there was really something for everyone.
Knowledge transfer
To start the day, Bert Jan Schrijver gave a very inspiring talk on the topic of knowledge sharing and encouraged us all to share our knowledge and give talks at such events ourselves. He also gave us practical tips. For example, if we didn’t know which knowledge was worth sharing, just grab a colleague and talk about what you’ve been up to lately.
Agility just a trend?
During the morning, there was another great talk by Manfred Wolff, who asked the critical question of whether agile is just a trendy movement. Under the disguise of this provocative question, he used the Cynefin framework in his talk to make it clear when it makes sense to use agile and how the complex and complicated worlds are differentiated from each other.
What makes software unmaintainable?
Frank Gerberding explained what it takes for a system to become unmaintainable. Of course, there were also practical tips on how to prevent exactly this scenario. For example, we learned that software can become unmaintainable due to:
- a too short time-to-market,
- lack of maintenance,
- toxic competition among developers,
- perfectionism.
Therefore, a balance between tactical and strategic development is imperative.
Open Source - curse and blessing
In the afternoon, Sascha Doemer shared his very own experiences on the topic of Open Source with the audience through his likeable and funny manner. In a project in agriculture he used the opportunity of Open Source and had some learnings. As the title of the lecture “Open Source - Curse and Blessing” revealed, he explained the advantages and disadvantages from practical experience and used user comments to illustrate what to expect.
Reactive Programming, Ensemble Programming and DDD
At the same time there was also a presentation on reactive programming with Java, where the advantages and disadvantages of reactive programming were explained using concrete examples and experiences.
In the further course of the afternoon there were still two exciting lectures on collaborative topics. First, Christian Rucinski and Zeb Ford-Reitz reported on their experiences with Ensemble Programming (or Mob Programming) in cross-functional composition. Afterwards Matthias Eschhold and Nils Hyoma talked about their experiences with scaling teams based on Domain Driven Design and fluid teams.
At the end of the day, Björn Ebner emphasized in his presentation how important continuing education is and how it is changing in times of New Work. With his presentation, he perfectly rounded off this day full of interesting (continuing) education content.
In addition, the participants had lots of opportunities to exchange ideas and experiences. Due to the good layout of the break and buffet hall, many interesting conversations took place.
Once again, it was an all-round successful event. We are looking forward to next year and hope to meet many familiar and unfamiliar faces there.
Our impressions
