Markus Westergren on foojay.io - Friends of OpenJDK

The Code Was Always the Door

Tue, 05 May 2026 08:59:45 +0000

The doorman in a hoodie

There’s a story Rory Sutherland tells in his book Alchemy . A consultant is hired to find savings at a luxury hotel. He watches a doorman for twenty minutes and writes in his report: this man opens doors. Automatic doors also open doors. Automatic doors are cheaper. So the hotel removes him.

The lobby falls apart. Guests can’t find the restaurant. Nobody hails a taxi. The ineffable sense that someone is in charge of the front of house disappears with him. The consultant measured the visible action and missed the actual function.

Foojay Podcast #94: More Than a Blog: How Foojay Connects, Sustains, and Evolves the Java Community

Mon, 04 May 2026 06:26:00 +0000

Foojay.io, the website for the Friends of OpenJDK, is turning six years old. To celebrate, Frank Delporte headed to JCON in Cologne, Germany, and sat down with twelve members of the Java community to talk about what Foojay means to them, what they learn from each other, and how the community is evolving.

This episode covers a lot of ground. Sharat Chandar reflects on 25 years in the Java community and why the people are what keep the language alive. Markus Westergren and Iryna Dohndorf both focus on a theme that comes up again and again: developer sustainability. Not just green software, but how you stay healthy, grounded, and relevant when AI is changing everything around you. Markus and his wife researched how developers are reacting to AI, from ignoring it completely to transforming everything they do. Iryna talks about building resilience and robustness as skills, not afterthoughts.

Announcing: Sustainability for Java Developers

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 11:04:54 +0000

Java developers from around the world are writing a book about a question that’s becoming impossible to ignore: how do we write software that’s good for both our projects and the planet?

Sustainability for Java Developers: Towards an Understanding of Sustainable Java Software Development is now freely available on Leanpub, bringing together Java Champions, architects, and technical writers to look at sustainability from every angle.

The book covers everything from the environmental footprint of our data centers to the ethics of open source supply chains, from efficient data formats to the often-overlooked topic of career longevity.

Why Java is Still Worth Learning in 2025: A Developer's 25-Year Journey

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 06:32:05 +0000

I’ll be honest - my first encounter with Java in 1999 wasn’t love at first sight. It was during a university distributed systems course, and coming from a background in assembler and C, Java felt bloated, slow, and frankly untrustworthy. That “automatic memory handling” seemed like dangerous magic I couldn’t control. After years of meticulously tracking every allocated memory block, the idea that the runtime would handle memory management felt like giving up control to forces I didn’t understand.

For the first eight years of my career, I stubbornly stuck with C, convinced that Java was just a passing trend for developers who couldn’t handle “real” programming.

Foojay Podcast #72: JCon Report, Part 1 - Grow your career, public speaking, 30 years of Java, greener coding,...

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 13:55:37 +0000

On May 13th and 14th, Foojay attended the JCON conference in Köln, Germany, where we did over 30 live-stream interviews. In this episode, we present to you the first set of these interviews, in which we focus on celebrating 30 years of Java, how you can grow your career, become a public speaker and writer, make your code more green, a bit of AI (of course…), and how the connections between open-source contributors can be visualized.