This year we attended Devoxx 2013 with a total of 9 JDriven colleagues. After more than a week we finally recovered from a vast amount of great sessions, personal encounters and  'some' Belgian beer. Looking back at Devoxx we had a great conference and like to thank the Devoxx team for making this possible. It was also good to notice that the majority of the sessions are related to subjects that drive us at JDriven, during our daily job and while further developing our expertise and craftsmanship, to name a few: Continuous Delivery, AngularJS, RESTful API's, Gradle, Groovy, Grails, Java 8, Java EE.

The Devoxx 2013 sessions will be available at Parleys soon, hopefully just before the holidays. To protect you from infobesity we'd like to share our list of must watch sessions with you:

Suggested Parleys Watchlist for Devoxx 2013

Sven Peters - How To Do Kick-Ass Software Development Sven, a presenter who is just full of energy, tells how software is developed at Atlassian and how they can build great software with even greater pleasure. He explains how a good team, becomes a kick-ass team. He also mentioned that we as developers are always working to help automate others, but often forget to automate our own work. The presentation contains lots of tips and tricks.

Guillaume Laforge - What Makes Groovy Groovy A great overview of the various aspects and power of Groovy targeted at Groovy newbies. The presentation contains great code examples, starting with Java code and showing off the Groovy alternatives ending up with less code but exactly the same functionality. A great session and good overview of how Groovy enriches (and improves) Java. Probably not too much news for Groovy experts but for a newbie certainly valuable.

Ben Hale - Designing a REST-ful API using Spring 4 Very good presentation that covered lot's the concepts of the REST standards (or lack of it) and how to implement this using Spring 4 features and Spring-HATEOAS.

Seth Ladd - Mobile, multi-device, multi-player with HTML5 and Dart A pretty solid, almost marketing, talk about developing the word game Boggle entirely using Dart. Seth also demonstrates his own recently developed API for offline-enabled browser-based web apps: Lawndart. The application has been developed as set of custom reusable components using polymer.dart (instead of angular.dart). This presentation gave a great overview of Dart and the initial impression of Dart is very impressive. It certainly creates interest in investigating and playing with Dart.

Paul Sandoz - in full flow: Java 8 lambdas in the stream A clear overview of the use of the new stream API to declaratively perform actions on lists using lambdas. Also the benefits and pitfalls of using streams in combination with multithreading are explained.

Simon Ritter - Is It A Car? Is It A Computer? No, It’s a Raspberry Pi JavaFX A very nice session that explained how a Carputer could be made from a RaspberryPI and the risks you introduce when connecting your car with a RaspberryPI. Using a touch screen connected to the RaspberryPI and an application developed using JavaFX to operate and view the data from the on-board computer.

Tugdual Grall, David Pilato - Elastify your app: from SQL to NoSQL in less than one hour! Within an hour, a simple application backed by a SQL database is converted to a CouchBase database and then coupled with a Elasticsearch. The steps to take to convert the existing application are clearly explained. After the conversion, the data in the system is visualized using Kibana.

Geert Bevin - Programmers are way cooler than musicians Geert Bevin presents the Eigenharp, a musical instrument which has been built on a completely different approach from it’s predecessors. Throughout his presentation he shows not only the instrument but also hints at the possibilities one gets if he lets go of “how things are”. An interesting display of thinking outside the box leading to a new design.

Hans Dockter - Gradle for Android and the Rest of the World Conference Hans illustrated the possibilities and power of Gradle by explaining how the Gradle based build system for Android works. This new build system has been developed as a Gradle plugin by the Google Android team. He also noted that some people see the flexibility of  Gradle as a downside but stated that the opposite is true because you can use the power of Gradle to limit this flexibility. For instance you could fail a build when dependencies from a non whitelisted  repository are used.

This is just our short list ;) but have fun and see you next year @Devoxx!