This November I took part in a java developers conference SMDev held by Sportmaster company in Lipetsk, Russia. This time as a speaker. My talk was devoted to small simple things in Java that are not so obvious as we want them to be. It was called “Strange java”

You know, this event has a story. When I worked as a team leader for the Sportmaster company, one of our developers came to me with a question about how does Spring Boot work. I asked him to prepare a short talk about it and present it to the team afterwards. After some days, the team already had two additional topics to talk about. We decided to hold a small internal event (the conference is a way too big word) to present the talks to the team. The event was successful and reached its goals. Sometime later we decide to make it a tradition to hold such events. Now, some years later this tradition grew up and became a conference. What a great example of forming the values of the company!

Last year I missed the opportunity to attend this conference, both as a speaker and as an attendee. So, this year I sent the talk request as early as possible. For me it is not just a public talk but also an excellent opportunity to visit the company I worked for, meet the teams to whom I helped to develop, and dive into the atmosphere of old days.

I sent a list of available topics to a programme committee of the conference, and we chose the one that keeps the tradition we used to have in the company in the old days. Short java quiz questions that are not so obvious as it seems at first glance. I hope this talk was interesting for the audience and someone might learn something new.

I liked this event, and I thank you guys from Sportmaster for having me!