Devoxx in Tweets

For the first time in several years I unfortunately had to skip this years Devoxx. There are so many tweets that remind me of the good talks going on there and I thought I would do something useful with them. So again I indexed them in Elasticsearch using the Twitter river and therefore can look at them using Kibana. David Pilato also has set up a public instance and I could imagine that there will be a more thorough analysis done by the Devoxx team but here are my thoughts on this years Devoxx without having been there.

I'll be looking at three things: The top 10 mentions, the top 10 hashtags and the tweet distribution over time. For the mentions I have excluded @Devoxx and @java, for the hashtags I have excluded #devoxx, #dvx13 and #dv13 as the mentions and tags are too dominant and don't tell a lot. I have collected all tweets mentioning the term devoxx so there will be a lot I missed. Each retweet counts as a seperate tweet.

Overall Trends

Looking at the timeline of the whole week you can see that the amount of tweets is high at the beginning and continually rises with thursday having even more tweets than wednesday which is quite a surprise to me. I would have thought that the first conference day is the one that has the most tweets.

Stephan007, the founder of Devoxx, has the most mentions which is no surprise. Chet Haase and Romain Guy are following. I have never seen a talk done by them but I probably should. The Dart language is the dominant hashtag with a lot of buzz around their 1.0 release. Java, Android and Scala are still hot technologies. Android is a bit of a surprise here. It's nice that the initiative Devoxx4Kids ranks quite high.

Daily Analysis

Monday

On monday the top mention is @AngularJS. Of course this is caused by the two AngularJS university sessions that lasted nearly the whole day. Angular is a hot topic but I am not yet planning to do any work with it. The session on JavaEE 7 also created a lot of interest as can be seen by the mentions of its hosts Arun Gupta and Antonio Goncalves. They especially encouraged people to participate on Twitter which seems to have been received very well. Scala is another hot topic with the university session by Dick Wall and Joshua Suereth that I would really have liked to see.

Tuesday

Tuesday is dominated by the two excellent speakers Matt Raible and Venkat Subramaniam. I especially regret that I couldn't see Venkat in action who I consider to be one of the best speakers available. I am not sure what the tag hackergarden is referring to as I didn't find an event on monday evening or tuesday. There is also quite some interest in Reactor, the reactive framework of the Spring ecosystem.

Wednesday

Brian Goetz got a lot of mentions for the keynote. I think it's a surprise that there are so many mentions of David Blevins for his talk EJB 3.2 and beyond which I wouldn't have expected to be that popular. The big event of the day was the launch of Ceylon 1.0 as can be seen from the hashtag. I heard good things about Ceylon but I still consider it an underdog of the alternative JVM languages.

Thursday

Romain Guy is leading the mentions with his very popular talk "Filthy Rich Android Clients", followed by Jonas Boner of Akka fame and Venkat Subramaniam. The launch of Dart 1.0 dominates the keywords. The Javaposse still ranks in the top 10 with their popular traditional session.

Friday

Friday normally has fewer participants than the other days. Joshua Suereth received a lot of tweets for his Scala talk, ranking high both in mentions and hashtags. The session on Google Glass also was very popular. I am not sure which session caused the mention of dagger.

Programming Language Popularity

Niko Schmuck proposed to add the language popularity over the week. As this is quite interesting here is the totally unscientific popularity chart that of course should determine which language you are learning next. I am not querying the hashtags but any mention of the terms.

Java dominates but JavaScript is very strong on Monday and Thursday. Ceylon has its share on Wednesday while Thursday is the Dart day. Scala is very popular on Monday and Friday.

A ranked version:

Java	1234
JS	584
Dart	490
Scala	252
Ceylon	172
Groovy	171
Clojure	94
Kotlin	16

The Drink Tweets

As there are quite some people tweeting we can see some trends with regards to the drink tweets. First the coffee tweets:

Quite a spike on Monday with people either mentioning that they need coffee or complaining about the coffee. This repeats on tuesday on wednesday in the morning, people seem to have accepted the situation on thursday.

Another common topic, especially since the conference is located in Belgium, are the beer tweets.

Surprise, surprise, people tend to tweet about beer in the evening. I like the huge Javaposse-spike on thursday with a lot of mentions of the beer sponsor Atlassian.

Conclusion

Though I haven't been there I could get a small glimpse of the trends at this years Devoxx. As soon as the videos are available I will buy the account for this years conference, not only because there are so many interesting talks to see but also because the Devoxx team is doing a fantastic job that I'd like to support in any way I can.

Updates

• 17.11. Added a section on programming language popularity
• 18.11. Updated the weekly diagram with a more accurate

About Florian Hopf

I am working as a freelance software developer and consultant in Karlsruhe, Germany and have written a German book about Elasticsearch. If you liked this post you can follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my feed to get notified of new posts. If you think I could help you and your company and you'd like to work with me please contact me directly.