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Hugh McKee
Hugh McKee

microservices, event-driven, event-sourcing, CQRS, Java, serverless, distributed systems,

Hugh McKee is a skilled back-end developer, and developer advocate with decades of experience building enterprise applications. Specializing in large-scale, cloud-based systems, Hugh is dedicated to learning new technologies and sharing his knowledge with others. As a developer advocate, he speaks at conferences worldwide and is the author of "Designing Reactive Systems: The Role Of Actors In Distributed Architecture." With a passion for teaching and evolving his software engineering skills, Hugh is a valuable contributor to the tech community.

Java

Are Your Microservices Small Balls of Mud?

Microservices continue to gain tremendous popularity given their potential benefits like independent deployability, polyglot implementations, and alignment with team organization. However, more organizations are finding microservices introduce significant complexities, especially at scale. It's easy for microservices to become an entangled mess of poor abstractions, failed transactions, unreliable communication, and technical debt accrued across versions. In this talk, I will make the case that many microservice implementations suffer from being small balls of mud. You will learn the telltale signs of systems exhibiting this anti-pattern, like services knowing too much about each other, brittle synchronous messaging architectures, failed deploys, blocking teams, and more. I propose event-driven architecture as an alternative model that solves many microservice woes. We will compare synchronous vs asynchronous messaging approaches. I will use non-trivial example design and code reviews to demonstrate how event-driven services remain decoupled using publish/subscribe messaging. I will also showcase transactional consistency benefits using event sourcing/CQRS patterns. And more. You will leave recognizing mud in your systems and equipped with practical architectural guidance to evolve towards event-driven services incrementally. By swapping microservice mud for event-driven clarity, teams can scale complexity without getting stuck. Join me as we explore if events offer the missing pillar for reliable, sustainable microservice architectures.

September 24-26, 2024
Dallas, TX Courtyard Dallas Allen

LONE. STAR. JAVA.

A community Java conference is coming to Dallas!
A three day event diving deep with experts from across the Java and Cloud ecosystem.

5 Tracks 50+ sessions 5 workshops

A premium Java, Cloud and Big Data conference at a community conference price!

Expert speakers including Java Champions, community contributors & open source commiters

Lots of opportunities to network with speakers and attendees!

JConf.dev attendees

Choose your ticket

Ticket fee includes breakfast, lunch, snacks, drinks, conference reception, tshirts, and entry into our mega raffle prizes and more!

Individual Conference Pass

Conference Only - September 25-26

Individual Workshop/Conference Pass

Conference + Training - September 24-26

Group (5+) Conference Pass

Conference Only - September 25-26

Group (5+) Workshop/Conference Pass

Conference + Training - September 24-26

Schedule

Tuesday, September 24

Wednesday, September 25

TimeRoom 1Room 2Room 3Room 4Room 5
8:00 AM

Registration & Breakfast

9:00 AM

Code Review, you said?

Venkat Subramaniam
10:00 AM

Trash Talk - Exploring the memory management in the JVM

Gerrit Grunwald

Clean code, is it really worth it? A story of monsters, heroes and victories

Jonathan Vila

Building a custom AI chatbot with Spring Boot, React, and LangChain4j

Marcus Hellberg

Are Your Microservices Small Balls of Mud?

Hugh McKee

Building data pipelines with open source

Rustam Mehmandarov
11:00 AM

Morning Break

11:30 AM

To Java 22 and Beyond!

Billy Korando

Apache Maven 4 is Awesome

Chandra Guntur

Codebase Resurrection: Revive and Refactor with AI

David Parry

Troubleshooting, Monitoring and Profiling with Java Flight Recorder, Mission Control and Cryostat

Jeremy Davis

Developer’s Guide to Test-Driven Development and Approval Testing

Burk Hufnagel
12:30 AM

Lunch

1:30 PM

Hidden security features of the JVM - everything you didn’t know and more

Steve Poole

Harmony in Innovation: Building Stronger Engineer-Product Relationships

Erin Geoghan

Gen AI for Java developers – one step at a time

Rich HagartyDana Price

The Wild West…East, North and South: Multi-Region Java Apps in the Cloud

Denis Magda

Erin S session TBD

2:30 PM

Afternoon Break

3:00 PM

Java cloud-native shoot-out: InstantOn vs CRaC vs Native Image

Rich Hagarty

Coding Fast and Slow: Applying Kahneman's Insights to Improve Development Practices and Efficiency

Baruch Sadogursky

Spring into AI: Building Intelligent Applications with Spring AI

Dan Vega

Navigating the Observability Landscape: From Serverful to Serverless with OpenTelemetry Journey

Daniel Oh

One Does Not Simply Query a Stream

Viktor Gamov
4:00 PM

Craft Fully Open Imperative and Reactive Cloud-Native Microservices

Emily Jiang

The Unseen Script: Documentation in Software Engineering

Valerie Gurka

Pass or Play: What does GenAI mean for the Java developer?

Jennifer Reif

Death to the Monolith

Cody Frenzel

Venkat session TBD

5:00 PM

Moving Java Forward Together

Sharat Chander
5:30 PM

Conference Reception

Thursday, September 26

2024 Workshops

Full-day, deep dive, hands-on workshops

Get a full day of training on these topics from industry experts!

Choose your ticket

Ticket fee includes breakfast, lunch, snacks, drinks, conference reception, tshirts, and entry into our mega raffle prizes and more!

Individual Conference Pass

Conference Only - September 25-26

Individual Workshop/Conference Pass

Conference + Training - September 24-26

Group (5+) Conference Pass

Conference Only - September 25-26

Group (5+) Workshop/Conference Pass

Conference + Training - September 24-26

Sessions

JConf.dev 2024 sessions

Click to see speaker and session details

Timeline

  • January 1

    2024 Kickoff

    Call for Papers, Early Bird tickets sales (first 100 only, then prices +$100), sponsor sales, scholarship program all open

  • January 31

    CFP Close

    CFP Closes

  • March 1

    Speakers Announced!

    Speakers announced, regular ticket sales

  • July 1

    Late ticket sales

    Late ticket sales, order now to get a swanky badge and tshirt

  • September 24

    Workshop day!

    JConf.dev 2024 starts with workshop day

  • September 25

    The big show!

    JConf.dev 2024 begins!

JConf.dev 2024 team

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