Recently I had the pleasure of hearing a first class speaker twice in 24 hours. The topics however were night and day apart. The Belfast Java User Group had managed to secure the services of Ben Evans – a Java champion and renowned author of the current “Java In A Nutshell” book to talk about using the JVM as platform for smart contracts. The evening talk centered around the benefits of using the well established JVM architecture to facilitate blockchain applications. Ben gave a rational and thoughtful summation of the pros and cons and then followed with some deep dive code review. It was a great talk and very informative but what came across was Ben’s enthusiasm and subject knowledge.
Not satisfied at getting one great presentation out of Ben – another was arranged for the following morning with a breakfast talk – “Java technologies in the Age of The Cloud” and this was at completely the other end of the spectrum looking at the potential for Java and JVM languages in the future of development. Some discussion on AWS and its development and place in solutions followed and a great introduction to the Hype Cycle and the Trough Of Disillusionment and the stage various technologies are at. Ben touched on the pros and cons including size of libraries and startup times versus the java ecosystem, libraries and IoT aspects. Kotlin and Scala were briefly touched upon.
I found the second talk useful and interesting but in a completely different way to the technical aspect of the previous. Ben has a great speaking manner and his knowledge shines through across a very broad range of subjects. It was great to see a speaker of Ben’s calibre at events in Belfast and I look forward to some more upcoming appearances !!
Thanks to Guruteam and Belfast JUG for arranging. Thanks to Ben for giving up his time !!