SpringOne Tour Minneapolis
The hardest part in writing about the SpringOne Tour Minneapolis is filtering out what not to mention. This post would otherwise turn into an unruly eBook.
In truth, all the speakers did an outstanding job and the two-day conference on the whole was more than worth the $150 I paid. Considering other popular tech conferences in the area charge 2 to 7 times this amount, the SpringOne Tour was an absolute steal.
One large benefit to attending conferences is to expand our perspective on the tech landscape. I’ve found it’s very easy to get tunnel vision in our world as developers.
Likewise, we get too focused on the tech stack and business domains in which we’re working, ultimately to our detriment. Attending an event such as the SpringOne Tour is a great way to learn what’s on the horizon and what are peers are up to elsewhere.
Reactive
While the Reactive model of programming is not brand new in the Java world, it still seems very much in its infancy in the enterprise space. This is likely to change in my estimation.
For instance, the rapid transition to microservices architectures seems to warrant a closer look at the reactive programming model. To illustrate, imagine a number of backend microservices that all use blocking I/O calls. It’s easy to see how quickly performance can degrade in this scenario. Especially as more services are added to the application over time.
But, don’t take my word for it. Take it straight from two Pivotal Jedi Masters, Josh Long and Mark Heckler, in this video: Reactive Spring. **Note: this talk was done at a different conference. Both presenters gave separate talks at the SpringOne Tour Minneapolis event and were fantastic!
Pipelines
Another major theme of the presenters centered around the DevOps pipeline space. The transition to microservices has made it a necessity to build robust pipelines to manage complexity. This makes perfect sense as you can imagine what a nightmare it would be to require manual processes to build and deploy hundreds or even thousands of microservices.
Kubernetes has won the container wars by most accounts. Therefore it was not surprising to see multiple conference sessions dedicated to the topic.
The Spring Cloud Kubernetes demo by Ryan Baxter in particular made historically difficult things look incredibly easy. Although I haven’t personally tinkered with this project, it’s definitely one I’m looking forward to testing out in the near future.
Architecture
And finally, It wouldn’t be a proper developer conference without several talks on software architecture. Fortunately, SpringOne Tour Minneapolis delivered with quality in this department.
In truth, it’s just a very difficult topic to cover well in my opinion. Any good architecture discussion basically boils down to “it depends.” As of course a good architecture all depends on the context in which it’s deployed.
Both Nate Schutta and DeShaun Carter gave very insightful and engaging talks on the big topic of architecture. Striking the right balance between pragmatism and useful heuristics is challenging, but done well by both speakers.
Bonuses
There are a number of bonuses to attending the SpringOne Tour apart from the main talks. The Pivotal Conversations session allowed for easy conversation directly with the presenters, all of whom were very approachable.
Except for Josh Long, whose Intellij’s Nyan Progress Bar 
made him seem intimidating. Totally kidding, Josh is very friendly and watching him give a live demo is performance art from a master.
We also had plenty of opportunities to chat with the presenters and other attendees. Whether over breaks or during the Monday evening networking and social hours, it was easy to talk tech with some of the leaders in our field.
All in all the SpringOne Tour’s price to value ratio was exceptional.