Of all the regular conference speakers on the Java circuit Venkat is my favorite. He has the ability to break down complex topics and make them very simple to understand. In addition to all of that he also shows you why you should care, and how whatever he is presenting can make your development life better. I always hope that when I am explaining something that I can do it 1/10th as good as he does as then it will probably come across pretty fairly understandable to the person that I am talking to.

Venkat has done it again, I was looking at some news in my blog feed and one of the stories had a link to a talk he did at Devoxx Belgium (a conference I have always dreamed of attending) on Reactive streams. In 2014 I was at Venkat’s talk at SpringOne and it completely blew my mind and showed me why I needed to embrace Java 8 Lambda’s and Streams. With this talk on Reactive he is taking the same approach. Breaking reactive down in a way that you can relate to the Java 8 streams features and showing you why it matters. If you have a spare 2.5 hours this talk is well worth it: