DevBcn 2023

I've been presenting at the JBCN / DevBCN conference, held in Barcelona, Spain, for eight years. Originally started as a Java Conference organized by the local Java User Group, I watched the conference grow from a few hundred people to 1000+. This is a massive achievement by the organizers, and it is always fun to come and meet new and old friends in sunny Barcelona.

This year, I presented about Building Platforms on top of Kubernetes to reduce the pain for developers and how tools like Dapr can help to enable developer teams to focus on coding and consuming APIs that Platform Teams can configure.

The audience is still mostly Java Developers, but I can see how new tracks focused on non-technical topics are gaining popularity. I run five polls for my audience (around 100 people), and here are their answers:

For an audience that primarily knows about Kubernetes, only a few knew Dapr, so I got very positive feedback about the presentation and the project itself.  

You can find the demos that I've shown during the presentation here:

• Platform Walking Skeleton with Crossplane and VCluster (plus Dapr and Knative): https://github.com/salaboy/from-monolith-to-k8s/tree/main/platform/prototype
• Dapr, Spring Boot & Testcontainers: https://github.com/salaboy/dapr-testcontainers

I was surprised by the number of people interested in non-tech presentations and how full the room was for every session. This shows a tendency to include more non-tech topics and non-tech people in our very tech-driven conferences.

Talking with sponsors and large companies like Revolut, King, N26, and Zara, they are all full on their Kubernetes adoption journey and hiring aggressively. One thing is clear, Barcelona is hungry for Cloud-Native talent, which was the number one reason for sponsoring the conference.  Are you looking for a job in tech, and do you like the idea of living in Barcelona?

Let's see if I can make it to nine years in a row!

See you all next year! 🏖️

Slides and Pics