November 05, 2015 / by Torsten Bøgh Köster / CTO / @tboeghk

W-JAX 2015 recap

This year I had the great opportunity to present some of our latest development techniques regarding streaming algorithms at the W-JAX conference in Munich. I enjoyed three days of interesting talks, chats, friends and bavarian food.

Although being a CTO, I’m usually not attracted to pure CTO stuff related talks. On tuesday though Stephan Schmidt organized a very interesting CTO day. It contained some interesting talks and insights regarding recruiting and people development processes.

Wednesday’s focus was on microservices and REST APIs. Eberhard Wolff held several talks about microservices, their infrastructure and connectivity. I gathered some interesting insights in Spring Boot and the Spring Cloud frameworks. Both are looking very promising, especially the Spring Cloud framework could act as the missing puzzle piece in service discovery. Jürgen Höller, Spring Core project lead, presented some knifty, hands on configuration tricks new to Spring 4.x.

Highlight of the day was Fabian Stäber’s talk about HTTP/2. It focussed on the server-to-server communication but was very inspirational. I think we’ll give it a first try in media and product image delivery.

Thursday marked a real gem presented by John Davies: an in-depth walk through serialization in Java and how to (not) do it. It was a tremendous reminder to re-think the strucuture of in-memory data storage, like in my recent REST-API-Server for db-ip.com. He pointed out that by better controlling what data (byte[]) is put into Java old generation heap, you can reduce both heap usage and runtime performance.

My streaming algorithm talk

In my talk an tuesday I covered the progress we made in the last year using probabilistic data structures like the BloomFilter or the Count-Min-Sketch. The reception was incredibly warm although I encouraged people to participate by handing out free beer :-)

You can find the slides on Speakerdeck and a complimentary article on jaxenter.de.