Speaking at Devoxx France 2024: Insights and Highlights

Devoxx France is a huge conference that takes place in Paris. This year, more than 4500 attendees were present with 70 exhibitors and 319 speakers.

It's so huge that it's impossible to attend all the talks. Sometimes, there are more than 10 talks at the same time, but thanks to the replay on YouTube, it's possible to watch them later.

My Schedule ​

Before going to Devoxx France, I had a look at the schedule and I made a list of talks that I wanted to attend. There are so many people that some talks were already full when I arrived at the room, and I discovered some talks that I preferred during the event (and choosing between all of these talks is not easy).

This year, my goal was to see a maximum of talks about DevOps and clean code. I also wanted to be surprised by going to talk that I never go to just because I know the speaker or because the title is interesting (and I was not disappointed).

Finally, I was able to see (talk titles are in French):

• Wednesday, 17 April
  • IA en médecine : où en sommes-nous ? Presented by Jean-Emmanuel Bibault
  • React Server Components : Effet de mode ou réel progrès ? Presented by Thomas Simonnet
  • High-Speed DDD (revisited). Presented by Thomas Pierrain
  • V, comme Vautledétour. Presented by Emmanuel Remy
  • Comment bien planter un side project ? Presented by David Laizé
  • Toutes et tous Mercenaires de DevOps! Presented by Arnaud Héritier, Henri Gomez, Pierre-Antoine Grégoire, Dimitri Baeli, and Gildas Cuisinier
  • La recherche sous stéroïdes - une histoire de sémantique. Presented by Mathilde Rigabert and Martin Labenne
• Thursday, 18 April
  • Programming’s Greatest Mistakes. Presented by Mark Rendle
  • Un monde shooté aux métaux. Presented by Guillaume Pitron and Agnes Crepet
  • GatewayAPI, 10 ans de maturation pour une nouvelle API Kubernetes. Presented by Kevin Davin
  • Comment K8S a changé le monde de l'Ops. Presented by Aurélien Moreau and Loïc Ortola
  • Architecture Hexagonale: Comment venir à bout du code spaghetti ? Presented by Kévin LLOPIS
  • Java rencontre l'IA : Comment intégrer les LLMs dans vos applications avec LangChain4j. Presented by Lize Raes
  • Les nouveautés de Java 21. Presented by Jean-Michel Doudoux
  • Debugguez votre salaire ! Mes stratégies gagnantes pour réussir sa négociation salariale. Presented by Shirley Almosni-Chiche
• Friday, 19 April
  • Comment modéliser l’état du monde en 2100 ? Le Rapport Meadows. Presented by Anatole Chouard
  • Cybersécurité et cyberdéfense : un sujet géopolitique. Presented by Guillaume Poupard
  • Model Mitosis : ne plus se tromper entre les microservices et le monolithe. Presented by Julien Topçu and Josian Chevalier
  • L’architecture micro frontend : comment transformer son site web en puzzle géant collaboratif. Presented by Maxime Ribera and Ludovic Lagatie
  • Unifié et Universel, le JavaScript avec UnJS. Presented by Estéban Soubiran (it's me)
  • Au-delà des heures : La semaine de 4 jours comme levier d’égalité. Presented by Albane Veyron
  • Créer sa propre VM avec compilation JIT pour les nuls. Presented by Olivier Poncet
  • L'Architecture Hexagonale par la pratique, le live coding qui rendra vos applications plus pérennes. Presented by Julien Topçu
  • Accessibilité du web : du design au code comment tendre vers davantage d’inclusion ? Presented by Marjorie Aubert

Yes, there is some Java (I'm a web dev doing JavaScript) because I love to discover other languages and how they solve problems, the way they think and the tools they use. At the same time, the more time I spend in the web world, the more I think I need to learn Java because it's very convenient for big projects with its strong typing and its powerful dependency injection.

This year, there is a trend about LLM, AI, RAG, and how to integrate them into your business. Since AI is available for everyone for cheap, there are more and more usages (and real usage) of them. It's not only for big companies but also for small companies and even for individuals. So many possibilities, it's very exciting and many talks show that.

At the end of the day, all of these talks are good and you will definitely learn something by watching them on the Devoxx France YouTube channel. Go ahead!

One of the interesting parts of Devoxx France is the exhibitors. There are many stands where you can meet partners, discover new tools, and have fun. This year, I discovered I didn't take a lot of time to visit them, but I discovered some new tools and projects. One of them is to help teams to agree on best practices and to follow them or another one which builds a data center using GCP stack but without Google in order to be GDPR compliant and to build a 'trusted cloud'.

Speakers Dinner ​

Wednesday evening, I had the chance, with every other speaker, to attend the speakers' dinner. It was a private moment to meet the other speakers, and to chill before the rest of the event. I have to admit that this is not really my cup of tea to talk to unknown people, but the food was great so it was a nice moment.

My Preferred Talks ​

I really want to highlight some talks that I really enjoyed and that I recommend to everyone (some of them are truly mind-blowing).

The first one is the talk about RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) where I learned a lot about this concept, how to use it and frameworks that make it easy to use. I really think this technology is the future, but it will be the subject for another article (I need to learn more about it and to start using it).

The second one is the talk about micro front-end. On paper, the subject is interesting but too often, talks about micro front-end are very theoretical, not very practical, and usage, with benefits, is not clear. But, this talk was at the opposite of that. They explained, in detail, how they implemented and used it and more importantly, why they do it. At the end, the live coding was on the live website (yes, on leroymerlin.fr) and it was very impressive.

The third one is the talk that retraced the history of DevOps from 25 years ago. It was very interesting to see how successive technologies are linked to each other and to understand that the actual state of DevOps is the work of years, steps by steps. It's not a revolution but a progressive evolution, from VMs to containers, orchestrators, and IaC.

By hazard, but because I like the content of the person on X, I went to a talk about JIT. I knew about this term and the objective but not how it was implemented. In 45 minutes, the speaker coded a simple but functional JIT compiler in C++. It almost looks easy and I think it's important to know how these pieces of tech, that we use every day, work.

The last one was about hexagonal architecture. I already know the concept, but I never implemented it. The speaker did a live coding session where he implemented a simple application with hexagonal architecture. It was very interesting to see how the code is organized and how it's easy to test and to maintain. The fact that he implemented the domain (business logic) first with tests and then connected it to the infrastructure (the framework) was very nice to discover. I will definitely deep dive into this concept and write articles about it. When you go to a talk like this, it's like going to the theater and seeing a movie, I love this experience.

Overall, you should really watch these talks. They are very interesting and you will learn a lot.

My Talk ​

This year, I submitted 3 talks to the CFP (Call For Paper):

• Construire un méta framework front-end pour l’edge (in English: Building a meta front-end framework for the edge)
• Unifié et Universel, le JavaScript avec UnJS (in English: Unified and Universal, JavaScript with UnJS)
• Atteindre l’edge avec Nuxt (in English: Reaching the edge with Nuxt)

And one of them was accepted. Yippee! It's important to note that Devoxx France is, originally, a Java conference, and I'm pretty sure that the edge is unknown for most of the attendees, and this could explain why these talks were not accepted.

But one was accepted, and I have to prepare it!

I chose to talk about UnJS because I love the philosophy behind it, and I think it's a very good tool for a JavaScript developer. Talking for 15 minutes about UnJS is also a challenge because that's not a lot of time, and the quantity and diversity of packages that UnJS provides is huge.

The first step is to choose packages I wanted to present. Then, I have to select which part of the selected packages I want to present, the one that could be interesting for most of the attendees. It's way more difficult than having a 1-hour talk where I could go deep into the subject, but it's a good exercise to be concise.

Finally, I ended up talking about the history and philosophy of UnJS and presenting useful packages for most developers like unbuild, nitro, or magic-regexp and going straight to the point for each of them. My goal was to give a good overview of UnJS and to make people want to try it.

Fortunately, I was able to train my talk at StrasbourgJS. This helps me to refine some parts and to be more confident.

My talk was on Friday at 12:35, and until 12:20, I was confident. I repeated my talk many times, and I know UnJS. But when I came into the room and stood behind the desk, the stress came. Then, I started talking, and everything was fine. I'm proud of my talk. I really hope you will enjoy the replay on the Devoxx France YouTube channel.

Slides are coming soon.

A good thing done, and it's so good to share knowledge with others and talk with them. I feel that I still have a long way to go before making the perfect presentation, so I will continue to submit talks to conferences and to meetups.

Finally ​

Devoxx France is a unique event. There are so many talks, so much diversity in the subjects, and so many people that you will definitely learn something. This year was the biggest Devoxx France ever with more than 4000 attendees.

And even if the event is physically finished, it continues online with the replay on YouTube. So, if you can't attend, you can still watch the talks!

Thanks to the organizers and the red coat team for this amazing event. I hope to see you next year (I'm already working on many talks for the next edition)!

Until then, take care and keep learning!