Java Champion Trisha Gee on NoSQL, IntelliJ and Java 8

One of the most popular speakers to arise from the conference circuit over the past few years is the recently appointed Java Champion Trisha Gee. We sit down with Gee with the goal of talking to her about her upcoming session, "Applying Java 8 Idioms to Existing Code" at QCon 2016 in New York City. Unfortunately, we end up talking to her about everything but.

While her QCon focus is Java 8, at past conferences Gee has spoken about career-oriented topics, namely about how to keep on top of things when the technology landscape is changing so quickly. While suggesting that it's always best to focus on what you enjoy, and how nobody can be an expert on everything, we ask the Java Champion how she squares that circle against the increasing call on the IT job boards for full-stack developers who need to know everything about all things.

A journeyman of software development

Gee herself has taken her own advice, and has made herself an expert on different topics at different times throughout the past decade, including past tenure as a developer advocate at MongoDB, along with her current role as a developer advocate for the IntelliJ integrated development environment at JetBrains. That leads us into a conversation about how she felt about the query capabilities of a NoSQL database compare to the abilities of a relational store, and whether or not she feels a MapReduce approach to data searching can live up to the expectations of developers who have grown up learning how to use a relational database.

Of course, document stores were Gee's previous focus. Now she's working with JetBrains, which has us pontificating on why software developers, who are notoriously stingy, are always so willing to open their wallets and pay for IntelliJ or RubyMine, especially when great open source alternatives like Eclipse and NetBeans exist on the market. We also get her take on JetBrain's new programming language, Kotlin, along with the interesting trends she sees happening in the mobile development landscape.

In the end, we forget to talk about her QCon session about Java 8 idioms. I'm afraid that if you want to learn more about that topic, you'll have to attend her session or stream it when it's available. To hear her full take on all of the other topics discussed here, listen to the accompanying podcast.