Last Sunday my first Devoxx journey began, when I landed in the cute Antwerp. First thing in the morning: taxi to the Kinepolis Event Center. 5 minutes in the queue and I had my Devoxx badge!

My talk about RxJava was at 18:05, so I had plenty of time to attend other talks and meet new people. However, the first thing I wanted to do was to explore the venue and check out the rooms. I was like:

When they said “Kinepolis”, I didn’t really catch the

“Yep, it’s an actual cinema, man!”

thing. The stages were huge and they were not “flat”. You had this massive “wall of people” looking at you, with this gargantuan screen behind you. Surely this last detail cleared my doubts:

I wonder if my fonts are large enough :-/

The day passed quickly, indeed. I learned about Docker and Kubernetes from Arun Gupta and attended a comparative talk by José Paumard (@JosePaumard) about RxJava and Java8 Streams.

Time for my talk!

The talk was only 30 minutes, but they were very intense. The stage and the setup was super-cool! Turned out that the huge screen was more empowering than scaring!
I had a couple of tricky questions and a lot of feedback, both offline and online:

Conclusions

Devoxx was a great experience. I would have liked to be there for the whole week, but, even if it was only for a few hours, I loved the atmosphere, the people and the possibilities.

I met new friends:

I met old friends:

Media

I want to thank the whole staff at http://www.devoxx.be/ for the organization, for the on-stage support and for the speed to release the video of my talk. I mean, they did it in less than 48 hours! That’s impressive!

My slides are available here https://github.com/hamen/rxjava-essentials

Be water, my friend!