Confitura is definitely about people and community for us. There was a possibility to meet with TouKs (this is our name for ourselves) who work mostly remotely, friends, future co-workers, and also to reunite with ex-TouKs.
\nTo begin with, some numbers. We met after a three-year covid break. Fifteen hundred people attended; a smaller number than in previous years, but this was also the case at other conferences. As usual, there was a Call 4 Papers, and following a Vote 4 Papers, 28 speakers were chosen to present, divided into four paths.<\/p>\n
We are very happy that four TouKs were chosen to give their presentations.<\/p>\n
– Piotr Fus<\/a> – Jak zacz\u0105\u0107 z metrykami? (How to get started with metrics)<\/span> (We will add videos as soon as they are available here: https:\/\/touk.pl\/talks\/<\/a>.)<\/p>\n It was also very nice to see our former co-workers on the agenda: Jakub Nabrdalik<\/a>, Grzegorz Piwowarek<\/a> and Robert Piwowarek<\/a>.<\/p>\n Apart from our great speakers, TouK took part as a sponsor as well. We\u2019ve been a loyal partner ever since the first edition. We had a TouK and Nussknacker booth. You could hear about our culture, how we work, the projects we work on and our product Nussknacker<\/a>.<\/p>\n Of course, a lot of TouKs were there to listen to the talks. Here are some of their thoughts.<\/p>\n Tomek Kalkosi\u0144ski<\/a>, one of our most experienced developers, wrote:<\/p>\n Microserwisy w rytmie ABBA (Microservices to the beat of ABBA) \u2013 Tomasz Sepo\u0142owicz \u201cPanie, kto tu Panu tak…\u201d – czyli porozmawiajmy o Legacy (\u201cNow which cowboy did this?\u201d or Let\u2019s talk about Legacy) \u2013 Artur Skowro\u0144ski<\/a> Loom: rewolucja czy szczeg\u00f3\u0142 implementacyjny? (Loom: revolution or implementation detail) \u2013 Tomasz Nurkiewicz<\/a> Maciek Brzezi\u0144ski, one of our interns last summer, was attending Confitura for the first time. He gave his opinion about two presentations he saw.<\/p>\n Loom: rewolucja czy szczeg\u00f3\u0142 implementacyjny? (Loom: revolution or implementation detail) \u2013 Tomasz Nurkiewicz Best practices in practice: things that work for me so well I cannot believe you are not using it \u2013 Jakub Nabrdalik<\/a> Maciek Pr\u00f3chniak, who presented himself this year, commented:<\/p>\n After my talk I decided to listen to the following speakers (sometimes only for a while):<\/p>\n Bare metal Java \u2013 Jarek Pa\u0142ka<\/a> – as always it was fun, a bit chaotic and very, very technical – I didn\u2019t follow all the details as I came a bit late.<\/p>\n Loom: rewolucja czy szczeg\u00f3\u0142 implementacyjny? (Loom: revolution or implementation detail) \u2013 Tomek Nurkiewicz – neat, clean, very informative talk about Project Loom. Maybe it didn’t change my view of the world, but for sure it helped to set various pieces of information in order.<\/p>\n 3 kroki w ty\u0142 albo 2 lata do przodu czyli o do\u015bwiadczeniach po do\u0142\u0105czeniu do du\u017cego projektu open source (Three steps back or two years forward \u2013 or My experience after joining a large open source project) – Mateusz Gajewski<\/a> – this, on the other hand, was a rather soft & light talk. Very encouraging as a story of an architect who came back to “hardcore” coding \u2013 a lot of observations \u2013 also about himself. Quite refreshing.<\/p>\n Business Decisions Management with DMN. How to automate decisions and scale-out SME knowledge. – Marek Buba\u0142a – well, I have a bit of mixed feelings on this one. The topic was quite interesting \u2013 how to make business logic accessible for subject matter experts (we also do it with Nussknacker<\/a>!) \u2013 but the slides were hard to read, and the whole setting was a bit “enterprisey” \u2013 more of a sales presentation from Goldman Sachs than a good conference talk. Nevertheless, I’ve learned some interesting slogans.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Antek R\u00f3\u017ca\u0144ski focused on the content but also on the form of presentation:<\/p>\n Architektura i architekt AD2022 (Architecture and architect A.D. 2022) \u2013 Jakub Kubry\u0144ski<\/a> Concurrency – Java memory model – nie tylko dla or\u0142\u00f3w (Concurrency \u2013 Java memory model \u2013 Not only for experts) \u2013 Krzysztof \u015alusarski<\/a> GameDev okiem Backendowca (Gamedev through the eyes of a backend developer) \u2013 Robert Piwowarek<\/a>
\n– Maciej Pr\u00f3chniak<\/a> – No dobra, czas zsynchronizowa\u0107 zegarki\u2026 (Well, it’s time to synchronize our watches\u2026)<\/span>
\n– Dominik Przybysz<\/a> – OOP revisited.
\n– Monika Ruszczyk<\/a> – L10n, i18n i t9n w \u015bwiecie JVM (L10n, i18n and t9n in the world of JVM)<\/span><\/p>\n
\nA comprehensive vision of the architecture in the bank, plus a chat about what is most important in this vision. The answer, of course, is people, not diagrams! It was more a story about plans, technology selection processes and the long road ahead rather than a simple presentation about accomplished things. A good opportunity for a moment of reflection.<\/p>\n
\nArthur vividly summed up more than a year of work with a system that had been in operation since the 1980s. It was finally time to rewrite it, but no one knew how it worked. A very detailed presentation at a dizzying pace! We see every observation, every design decision and every implementation, and the action unfolds like a detective story. An intriguing presenter, lots of memes and hand waving \u2013 highly recommended!<\/p>\n
\nTomek showed lightweight threads in practice and what they affect. I expected it to be a revolution, but the number of physical processors can’t be fooled. And yet it is an implementation detail for specific cases.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nSystem threads in Java are quite heavy for some applications, and we often need quite a few more of them than we can afford. The resources we have are unlikely to allow us to run, say, a million threads. We’d probably run out of memory first or reach the operating system’s thread limit. In this area, Java is a little behind Kotlin and its coroutines, which are much lighter and share a finite pool of threads in an efficient way.
\nLoom is Java’s answer to this problem. It introduces virtual threads that are much lighter than system threads and can manage thousands of virtual threads using a few system threads. In a nutshell, we can call it Java’s answer to coroutines in Kotlin.<\/p>\n
\nEx-Touk Kuba Nabrdalik’s presentation was cool. He talked about good practices in Java, mentioned how well-written tests almost act as documentation. He gave as an example a colleague who once agonized all day over a module or application until he got annoyed and rewrote the whole thing… in one day! Asked by what miracle he\u2019d managed to do this, he said that the module was miserably written, but had well-written tests. In addition, he mentioned the advantages of mob review, where a large group, after their daily meeting, sit down together to review an even greater amount of code, so that more can be learned from it. And for me the most interesting thing he said was that if he writes an application, which he will also maintain later for the client, he writes it in such a way that, when something breaks, it is possible to find out without debugging just from the logs. Because, of course, you can write it and then, when it crashes, you won’t know anything without debugging, but when you maintain it later and fix it and have to debug it, you start to look at it a little differently.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nNicely presented, you can see that he has experience in giving presentations: he gestures correctly, does not umm or err, it was a pleasure to listen to him. But it also had substance: although the topic was broad, the author chose a couple of issues to focus on and described his experiences working with them in a succinct way; the listener did not feel “lost” or that the topic was beyond him. I really liked the unrelated “titbit” at the end of the presentation when the presenter boasted about his hobby: sports shooting. In his opinion, it deserves to be called “better yoga”, as it similarly calms and forces awareness of one’s body, while at the same time, in addition to the physical dimension, it requires analytical acumen and calculations as to wind speed, etc. A refreshing observation.<\/p>\n
\nNice presentation, of the “show me your code” kind, instead of baffling high-level concepts. The author gave the impression of having a lot of technical knowledge, while being a little worse when it comes to presentation skills, but still ok. It was valuable to show what tools to use in tests to reproduce strange results of concurrent code. The presenter did a good job of showing that many unpredictable results can be the result of just a java or machine version swap, with no changes to the code, and that, moreover, the JVM standard warns us about such cases. He also usefully showed in code how to properly secure multithreaded applications. After the presentation, however, I had the impression that this was a very broad subject and he\u2019d barely scratched the surface in those 45 minutes.<\/p>\n
\nIt was an interesting comparison of the tools used in the backend and gaming markets. There were some interesting insights into how COVID has affected game production \u2013 while most of the IT world can easily switch to remote work, in gamedev this raises problems related to the need for access to, for example, console development environments, which the console manufacturer did not provide in sufficient quantity at the beginning.<\/p>\n