Almost three weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking at Voxxed Days Zürich. This was my third time at this conference, and also my third Swiss Voxxed Days this year (which will be relevant later!).
Speaker dinner
The speaker dinner the evening before the conference is always a good time to catch up with friends and meet other speakers. Good food and drinks are a bonus.
Because the restaurant was a little loud (maybe because it was filled with speakers…), some of us ended up outside.
Photographer Dimitris Doutsiopoulos took advantage of this to take some beautiful pictures, like this one of Paco van Beckhoven and me, which my colleague Jason Torres pointed out looks like a still from a movie. (It does, doesn’t it?)
Welcome
The conference day started with a welcome by Federico Yankelevich and Patrick Baumgartner.
Patrick created a beautiful animation for this year’s edition. And I have to say I am rather partial to these colors. They even got the steps of the cinema to match!
During the session they called out the Voxxed Days Switzerland Champions. Apparently I was one of six speakers who spoke at all three Swiss Voxxed Days conferences: Voxxed Days Ticino, Voxxed Days CERN and Voxxed Days Zürich. As I am a sucker for vanity metrics, I really appreciated this callout. 😂
Speaking with Andres Almiray about Maven
At Voxxed Days Zürich this year, I had the pleasure to do a new(ish) talk with Andres Almiray: “Getting more out of Maven”. This was only the second time we did this talk (the first time was at JavaLand). Unfortunately we had some trouble connecting my macbook to the screen, which threw us off a little…
During the talk we discussed several tips for using Maven in IntelliJ IDEA. We showed using the Maven wrapper to increase reproducibility of the build, and the enforcer plugin to see where your build breaks. We explained Maven lifecycle and goals, as well as how inheritance works, and more. And of course, we showed some useful IntelliJ IDEA features for working with Maven and dependency management, the dependency analyzer to find conflicts in dependencies, inspections to show you when dependencies have known vulnerabilities and finally the Vulnerable API inspection which can show you whether you are actually using the vulnerable API of a known vulnerability.
And of course, our session also included some custom memes that we created for this talk. If you want to see all the memes, you can find them in this repo.
Despite the initial technical trouble, overall our session went well. We got some positive feedback, and I had a nice conversation later with some of the attendees about the topic of our talk.
Other talks
During the day I managed to catch the following talks:
Agentic AI Patterns by Kevin Dubois and Mario Fusco
This was a great talk to stay up to date with everything AI. Kevin and Marco did also have some technical trouble, when there was some interference with audio from another room, which was quickly fixes by the conference.
Are We Ready For The Next Cyber Security Crisis Like Log4Shell? by Soroosh Khodami
Soroosh showed us how easy it can be to get compromised and different ways to prevent this.
Supercharge your JVM performance with Project Leyden and Spring Boot by Moritz Halbritter
Moritz showed us how Project Leyden can help you speed up your Spring Boot applications. Mandatory watching for anyone using Java and Spring Boot!
Hallway track
And I also managed to take advantage of the hallway track, again to catch up with people.
Thanks!
Many thanks to Federico Yankelevich, Patrick Baumgartner and team for organizing another great event! I hope to be back again in the future.
You can find the Voxxed Days Zürich photo album here and the playlist here.
Credit
All photos on this page by Dimitris Doutsiopoulos. 🫶