This my 5-th year in a row where together with jugmk attend Java2days, a conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. While not so obvious from the name it is a 2 day java conference and currently the biggest one near us that we can take a bus to go to.
This year I had a talk titled "From JavaSpaces, JINI and GigaSpaces to SpringBoot, Akka – reactive and microservice pitfalls"
or buzz words and hate words all in one.

About the topic 

My talk this year was about microservices even though it had a long title with lots of strange words it was more of a concepts talk.
I gave a basic introduction into what reactive programming means for different people, thereactive manifesto and of course Microsoft Excel.

Long title = crowds of attendees

Next part was to define what microservies are and what they can be for different organization.
The unix aspect of microservices had to be covered so I did just that.

My goal with the talks was not really to compare frameworks for this or that but I just gave a short overview of what ideas are behind the development of some libraries.

The last major section was the real conclusion phase called how not to fail at microservices.
I gave some  recommendations from my personal experience as well as references to important books on the subject.
One of them available on early access:

And also the famous Release It book which covers some of the scenarios that are essential for microservice development.

My main take out from the talk was :

 Don't fall for the hype and make sure you start small and then grow. If your team and operations can  handle it then increase the granularity. 

Here are the full slides of the talk:

Microservice pitfalls from  Mite Mitreski 

The conference 

As for the full conference it was great  to meet up with BG-JUG folks like Ivan St. Ivanov, Mihail Stoynov, Martin Tosev  and improve the cooperation between JUGMK and BG-JUG.
 There were also the  standard visitor's Josh Long and Andrew Lombardi who are there to stay :

I got to meet with John Davis and learn how others use archaic tuple space technologies and how the banking world functions. Overall it was a great experience and even though at time some of the conference topics were overly light or outdated for my taste but the social aspect of it was more than sufficient to cover any shortcomings on the technical side.
For example Mani Sarkar had a great talk on "Learning the two Ts", it was great to meetup with him as well. 


One other positive trend that is happening this year is we had record number of JUGMK speakers and participants on Java2Days. The same trend is also on other conferences and is a great thing to see.

The JUG Factor

I know I'm forgetting someone to mentions, but overall an interesting social experience and a great meetup.