Trip Reports on foojay.io - Friends of OpenJDK

FOSDEM 2026: Open Source Supply Chains, CRA Compliance, and the Future of Software

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:52:20 +0000

(a.k.a. “So… what did you do this weekend?”)

I’m back from four days in Brussels and the uniquely exhausting experience that is FOSDEM. Mentally fried. Physically wrecked. Entirely glad I went.

The Chaos and the Crowd

Around 8,000 people made the trip this year. Some arrived for the first time; many returned as annual pilgrims.

FOSDEM remains a strange outlier in the modern conference world: free to attend, no registration gatekeeping, and no sponsors dictating the tone. You just turn up.

How we almost missed a plane, but OpenJDK could have saved us.

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 08:01:44 +0000

A family vacation as a topic for a Foojay blog post? Really? Yes, because, very unexpectedly, it was influenced by a change in the OpenJDK project…

Traveling to Kazakhstan

In August, our family vacation brought us to Kazakhstan. An important trip, as it is the birth country of our (now) 14 year old son. It was over 13 years that we had been there, and we planned to go back earlier, but some stupid virus messed up everyone’s life a few years ago…

JUG PH: 1H 2024 Meetups

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 07:59:11 +0000

Summary of the meetups done in the 1st half of 2024. We discussed a variety of topics which was useful to our Java enthusiasts and members.

2024 Meetup Kickoff

We kicked-off the Java meetup in partnership with Angular Philippines. The meetup had 2 sessions which was demonstrated by Mark Montealto and Eric Martin.

Progressive Web App using Angular Framework

A 1 hour session by Mark Montealto talking about how to make a Progressive Web aplication using Angular Framework. He started with the concepts and performed a live-coding.

JManc 2024 Trip Report

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 06:01:49 +0000

tl;dr

Great day, great people, great discussions and great team of dis-organisers!

Whoever comes are the right people!

Thanks to all who attended, it’s down to each and every one of you that JManc Unconference 2024 was a success!

See you next year! 😀

intro

In January this year we decided to test the interest of the Manchester Java Community on whether they were up for another edition of the JManc Unconference . We sent out a survey to our members and from the responses received there was unanimous support for to us to run it again. This gave Jon Bullock , Dave Underwood and I the motivation we needed to put plans into motion for the 3rd edition of JManc Unconference!

To Brussels, Canada and back

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 10:53:11 +0000

Last year was my first year blogging, speaking at conferences, meeting incredible people, and seeing places I’ve never been before.

It was at times quite arduous but at the same time energizing, as you can read in my post Looking back on one year of speaking and blogging. I didn’t want it to be a one-off year, so I dutifully started a new article series on eBPF and applied for conferences…

Apache APISIX North America Tour

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 15:31:08 +0000

Once in a while, I write non-technical blog posts when I’ve something worth sharing. Today, I’d like to write about my North America “Tour” across several conferences and user groups.

The first leg of my journey started in Oakland, California, with Developer Week . Developer Week is an established conference with different editions in several locations and online during the year. Though I’m on their advisory board, this is only the second time I’ve spoken at one of their events. Pro-tip: Avoid being on any board of a conference where you speak. It’s bad taste and casts doubt on whether you validated yourself.

State of Open (Source?!) and Free AI

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 13:04:44 +0000

Disclaimer: This article is on the things I learned/observed spending the day in AI and Machine Learning Developer Room at FOSDEM 24. Opinions and statements are mine and have nothing to do with my employer. This article might raise more questions than answers, but in my opinion, we all need more awareness on this topic and get familiar with the (right) questions that are to be answered.

FOSDEM

FOSDEM (Free Open-Source Developers’European Meeting) is a community-organised event that is free and non-commercial. The aim is to provide a venue for free and open-source software developers and communities to:

2023 Software Conferences in the Philippines

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 07:47:06 +0000

In the last months of 2023, technical conferences took place in the Philippines focusing on Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud Computing, Java, Open-source and Data related topics.

The Philippine Java Community were involved in two big conferences namely, Software Conference Philippines and Samsung Open Source Conference.

Members of the Foojay community were included as the speakers of the conferences, including me (Tristan Mahinay). This is the first time that the Friends of OpenJDK is involved in these big conferences. Thanks to Azul for being a sponsor of both events.

Looking Back on One Year of Speaking and Blogging

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 17:49:04 +0000

2023 was an adventurous year for me: I came into my blogging rhythm, blogging every one to two weeks, resulting in 39 articles, many of them on Foojay.io, spoke at my first conferences, around 14 overall, 22 if you include JUGs and online conferences, and continued working on my IntelliJ plugin , as well as my proposal for a new profiling API .

This article is a recollection of the year’s highlights. If you want a complete list of my presentations, visit my Talks page or the Presentations page in the SapMachine Wiki.

Johannes Bechberger's Tour d'Europe

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 17:08:53 +0000

Between 31st May and 14th June, I was on tour, giving seven talks in 4 cities in 3 different countries:

31st May: JUG Milano
5th June: OpenValue Munich Meetup
7th June: JDriven Full Stack Conference in Nieuwegein
10th and 11th of June: Gulasch Programmier Nacht Karlsruhe
14th of June: Karlsruher Entwicklertag

A visualization of all the cities I visited, but I took the train for all transits (except for the Arnhem to Nieuwegein route, where Ties van de Ven drove me in his Tesla).

It was an exciting trip, and I had the pleasure of visiting friends in Zurich and Augsburg and a grain mill shop in Munich.

JConf Toronto 2023 and the Dawn of a New Era of Concurrency

Tue, 23 May 2023 16:52:41 +0000

JConf Toronto , held on May 3rd, 2023, was a memorable gathering of Java enthusiasts and experts from both the local and global communities.

The event took place at the Chestnut Conference Center, Toronto, featuring a wide variety of in-depth sessions, interactive Q&As, and two insightful keynote presentations.

Notable keynote speakers included Venkat Subramaniam and Neal Ford .

Venkat’s keynote, titled “Know Your Java,” was a deep dive into the intricacies of Java, demonstrating that there’s always something new to learn, even in a language that’s over two decades old.

My Adventures at ConFoo Conference in Montreal

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 19:16:06 +0000

I attended the ConFoo conference in Montreal , which covered a range of technologies like cloud computing, Java and JVM technologies, Javascript, DevOps, architecture and design patterns, PHP, security, test and quality, management, UX and UI, and more.

The conference took place over three days at the Bonaventure Hotel in Montreal, but I could only attend on the second day.

To make it possible, I requested the organizers schedule both of my talks on the same day, so I could fly in from Toronto in the morning and leave in the evening. I was grateful to them for accommodating my request.

SpringOne TLV World Tour Trip Report

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 22:00:00 +0000

My talk was accepted by SpringOne in San Francisco. I never went to that conference and was really looking forward to it. This year would probably be amazing with the Spring 6.0 and Spring Boot 3.0 releases. So many groundbreaking changes. Unfortunately, my travel budget at Lightrun was cut, and I eventually left. This meant I had to cancel the trip, I would have paid for travel, but San Francisco is both far and prohibitively expensive. I’ll have to take a raincheck.

Trip Report: Dubai JUG 2nd Meetup

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 07:28:22 +0000

This was the second Dubai JUG meetup, yet the first real one. The first meetup was more of a practice team building session. Here is a trip report of the second Dubai JUG meetup at the PWC office.

First day in Dubai

This was my second time in Dubai. I had visited most of the landmarks the first time, making this a more relaxing visit without fear of missing out (FOMO). The temperatures were a lot more pleasant, where in June during my first visit it was above 40 degrees Celcius, this time around it was a more pleasant 30 degrees. I arrived Wednesday night in the hotel. I had set an alarm to make sure I wouldn’t miss breakfast and woke up a bit jet lagged. It’s surprising what just two hours of time difference can do!

Great Time at JavaZone 2022

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 07:57:36 +0000

I had a pretty awful travel experience trying to reach Oslo, but it’s all worth it for what is possibly my favorite conference: JavaZone.

I absolutely love this conference. It has everything: Sense of humor, craziness, heavy metal, continuous integration of food and amazing talks with great people.

This years conference has a fantasy theme which fits into the “weirdness” of the conference. Notice that when I say “weird” this is one of the highest complements I can give a conference. I a world of cookie cutter conferences JavaZone is unique in every way. See this opening scene in the morning of the first day…

Spring Boot Performance Workshop with Vlad Mihalcea

Fri, 24 Jun 2022 07:43:52 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, we had a great time hosting the workshop you can see below with Vlad Mihalcea. It was loads of fun and we hope to do this again soon!

In this workshop, we focused on Spring Boot performance but most importantly on Hibernate performance, which is a common issue in production environments.

It’s especially hard to track since issues related to data are often hard to perceive when debugging locally. When we have “real world” data at scale, they suddenly balloon and become major issues.

My Summary of jPrime 2022

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 18:37:55 +0000

Writing summaries of conference talks is the best way to focus on the talk and listen actively.

Before conference speaking became part of my job, I was already doing it.

However, I don’t attend that many talks now, and I don’t take notes when I do.

jPrime is a conference in Bulgaria, and after two cancellations due to Covid, they had their edition this week.

Probably, for this reason, the atmosphere is quite emulating: I attended a couple of talks and here are my notes.