Raible Designs

A Delightful Trip to Devoxx UK and GeekOut 2016

I had the pleasure of traveling to London, England and Tallin, Estonia this past week. In London, I spoke at Devoxx UK. In Tallin, I spoke at GeekOut. I took my mom (or mum, if you prefer) and we explored the sights, enjoyed local cuisines and savored a few beverages. Our trip started with a direct flight from Denver to London. We arrived on Tuesday, June 7, around noon.

We were only in London for two nights, but it was enough time for us to savor excellent Indian food, fancy a walk through London, and order a bow tie. I forgot the bow tie for my JHipster outfit. Luckily, I found a good replacement and was able to order it for next-day delivery. I had to order it by 5pm and the site declined both my credit cards with time running out. I ended up using PayPal and got my order placed in the nick of time: 16:59:51.

The big news announced at Devoxx UK is that Devoxx is coming to the United States in 2017! I'm on the program committee for this conference, so I look forward to helping make it spectacular.

I thought both my talks went well, but I did have some issues during my Angular 2 talk. I used Angular CLI to do the demo and IDEA kept indexing, which caused my live templates to fail. I later learned from an attendee (thanks!) that excluding the dist and tmp directories helps prevents this. You can find the source code for my demo on GitHub.

You can view my "Art of Angular in 2016" presentation on SlideShare, watch it on YouTube, or just click through it below.

I also did a presentation on JHipster, leveraging JDL Studio heavily. You can click here to see the JDL I used for my blog demo. A video of this session is on YouTube.

We closed out our visit to London with a fun speaker's dinner and an early morning flight to Helsinki, then Tallinn.

In Tallinn, we wandered through its Old Town, had some great meals and marveled at how late the sun set. We stopped in at the GeekOut conference's party on Thursday night. The ZeroTurnaround guys did a heckuva job planning this conference. I loved how both the party and the conference were in large, industrial-but-modern buildings with great sound systems.

My JHipster talk went well on Friday (slides here) and my mom and I celebrated at Rataskaevu 16 that evening. Then we shared laughs and learned how to play jackbox.tv at ZeroTurnaround's post-conference party.

Our last night was spent in Helsinki, a 20-minute flight from Tallinn. Since my grandparents are Finnish, my mom delighted in hearing words from her youth along the streets. We both took advantage and relaxed in our hotel's roof top saunas too. We indulged in a food/wine-paired dinner over three hours that evening.

Thanks to the organizers and good friends from Devoxx UK and GeekOut. We had a great time and are still smiling about all our new memories.