Sunday 30 November 2014

London Java Community - Open Conference 2014

I have had an absolute blast attending my 3rd LJC Unconference! As always I have learnt loads and this year I also had the opportunity to help others find out some nifty things as well :)

Discussion - Concurrent Applications In The Modern JVM & Using Akka

The last four letters of my name are still being horrendously neglected
I took the plunge and got roped in by our funnest software evangelist to answer the call of two developers interested in Modern Concurrency and Akka (@Simon - remember it is Edward - not Ed! :P)

When I originally agreed to do this in the morning, I was hoping for a small group of people to show up and we would have some simple roundtable discussion... Somehow at 3pm I found myself in the main room standing in front of thirty or more people!!! Luckily I had "The One" with me and the LSCC Roundtables have taught me how to lead a discussion (much love to Samir, Sandro and Tom for this!)

To start the discussion, I gave a little rant about how manually wiring up multi-threaded code is really hard and the pitfalls we found when using Akka in BetterRev - an Adopt OpenJDK project to change the way we change Java. From there we all talked about our various experiences and there were some great insights from people on a range of concurrency topics/tools. I really enjoyed the session and hope people got something out of it :)

Developing As A Developer - Getting Involved With The Community

The number of first time attendees to the conference was quite high and I got to speak to a bunch of developers that were just starting their professional careers. My advice to everyone was to get involved with the community, even if you by just blogging! Sharing the interesting things you have learnt is a great way to ensure you reinforce that learning and can lead you to learn new things.

One of the funnest and most rewarding things you can do with the community is to hack together. Attending code dojos and hands on sessions gives you the opportunity to learn more about anything from sweet IDE shortcuts to SOLID software design principles. I cannot recommend these enough!

Conclusion

Another year has passed and I'm already excited for the next conference. My thanks to all that gave me such invaluable advice again and to everyone involved in organising and running the conference!

Destiny - Awesomeness

3 months on from the full release of Destiny and despite all of its flaws, I am still very much enjoying this game. There is definitely fun to be had but it is very much dependent on how you approach the game. Finding a bunch of people that you can have a laugh with is invaluable, if you play alone you are missing out on some of the best content!

Moments of "awesomeness" await you, so long as you now how to find it. As I've mentioned before, there is a special move you can unlock that gives you the ability to soar through the air like Superman. This opens up the opportunity to play a hero that is fighting giant aliens to save the world, all the while pretending to be Kal-El... saucesome :D

Check out my channel for more Destiny awesomeness! https://www.youtube.com/user/arkangelofkaos