Foojay Podcast #31: Report of Devoxx 23 in Belgium

Transcript

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[0:00] Hello and welcome to this new edition of the Foojay podcast I’m at devox in ANP I have a microphone let’s see who we can talk to about Java welcome to the Foojay podcast all your news about OpenJDK the first week of October the 20th edition of Devo took place in Anor Belgium over 3,000 Java developers speakers and enthusiasts gathered to share the knowledge and learn from each other I got the opportunity to walk around with a microphone and talk to visitors and speakers not all of them as there were just too many people and too many exciting sessions happening simultaneously but I bumped into this very friendly person who according to the Devo speaker website should be addressed as the father of java although he doesn’t seem to agree I had nothing to do with that but still when asked how he feels about the Java Community he looks to be really proud I went past proud a long time ago I’m amazed astonished puzzled it’s just it’s freaking cool you’ll get the entire conversation with James Gosling later in this podcast let’s first meet the organizer of Devo Stephan jansson who has been living on an

[1:24] Overdose of adrenaline for the last couple of weeks congratulations this is box number 20 bloody hell 20 years well actually it’s 22 years so it’s like yeah it’s unbelievable how time flies I mean we just having so much fun here great content great team great venue and the beauty of having this event already for 22 years in this venue is that it’s all automatisms we really know to get the best out of this venue and the Dynamics and also with the people of this of the venue Etc and it’s just beautiful every year it’s just a pleasure to see this Vibrant Community get together with great mind sharing knowledge and yeah it’s it’s a very enjoyable experience I hear the greatest problem that people are having is the making a choice there are eight parallel tracks yeah so for me the most important thing apart from having good venue is the content content is King and this year and many other years we allow speakers to only submit three talks three proposals and we had a th000 proposals that we could choose from and we only have 200 slots so it’s 1 but I also invite speakers myself where I

[2:35] Know certain speakers that I have to have have to get here so it’s not the full 200 which comes from the CFB so from that point of view we have so many great talented speakers that we can choose from which allows us to really you know provide a great conference and also this year for me the focus was AI of course and the release of java 21 so I really pushed Oracle to get the engineers over here so we could really get it from the source but also like 30 I think it’s like 35 AI talks this year as well with large language models Etc so that really makes it also still exciting is that it’s not every year copy and paste every year there are new themes new ideas new insights that we try to get coverage at the event and with the luck of the big Evolutions going on in Java you have indeed new content well the beauty is that yeah the Cadence of every six months having a new version and they release it in September and we’re in October so it’s a really good fit yeah it’s a really perfect fit to then actually cover what’s been released in those two editions or the these two two versions do you have time

[3:36] Yourself to watch some talks well so yesterday I actually went to two talks at the end of the day which I really wanted to see in the morning in the keynote of course I see those but otherwise that’s that’s a bit the shame is that you spend almost nine months creating this baby so to speak and then you can’t really enjoy it because you’re just running around like a headless chicken from one fire to the other making sure that every every everything run smoothly however we record all the sessions and the next day the talks are already available from previous day so I will definitely watch quite a bit of talks in the downtime I call it the detox from devox period where I can just basically relax a bit and watch talks and catch up but the beauty as well is that we have another six other Dev oxes around the world running and there I really go as a tourist I go to the sessions I really try to do also prospection of speakers that we want to maybe invite for this Edition you’re lightning fast with the videos how do you achieve that to have them published already the evening after the

[4:36] Day it’s it’s it used to be very different I mean I used to spend six weeks manually working and making really the splits and so on and then burning them on a DVD and sending so we’ve we’ve come a far away but now well we have this comp the key is that we have a composite view of the speaker the slides and the backdrop and we basically record that so once that’s recorded we stopped the recording and after 35 minutes we actually have already uploaded it on YouTube and then the bottleneck is YouTube so it takes more for YouTube to transcode all the videos so basically in the evening we upload everything well we once the talk is finished they add the intro the Subscribe they upload it and by the evening everything is uploaded and then by the morning YouTube has transcoded everything and it’s available the next day so the beauty is on Friday I go home with a big smile on my face go like it’s so over nobody died and all the talks are alive so the community community can enjoy the content thanks a lot for this great conference thank you organizing a conference is a real team effort only a few of them were

[5:44] Available for a short talk during the event is this the crisis Centum of Devo yes yes it is and everything under control so far so good I would say yes yeah everything is under control everybody’s apparent ly happy so we are happy to what are you giving away polos special ones 20-year Edition ones so this is a collector’s item it definitely is every year is a collector’s edition the quality of any conference is not only defined by the speakers the mix of the attendees and how they mingle and share their knowledge and challenges defines a big part of the total experience I asked a few of them what they wanted to learn at devox and what sessions they scheduled to attend new stuff about Java interesting stuff mostly I’m a student so exploring the computer science world yeah M yeah I just think like things going so fast right now like you just blink your eyes and then wo everything new and then you need to relearn something but it’s also important that you moving forward you know like you’re optimizing things get better performance and yeah this kind of stuff and then for me it’s very important and

[6:55] To be like aware you don’t know everything but at least you are aware of what is happening and then the V bring this to you and then that’s nice to bring all this information together Java 21 and project the project loom for sure and in probably also and well we’ll see the new features of java 21 and now I think it’s more for architecture think like storing data Etc so what session are you looking forward to for today probably a second vat session this afternoon we still have to look but I followed one on AI already that was interesting also the Java 21 was also very interesting and this morning we went to a session about AWS about cloud computing they’re put into evidence even the chap DPT and everything about big Big Data artificial intelligence so it’s a very nice event and a lot to learn here I think a lot to learn a lot to learn yeah and what session are you looking forward to all of them I’m I’m not sure which ones I’m going to follow today I will see what do you love about Devo specifically Josh long that’s your favorite one yeah that’s why we were fangirling yesterday the whole company

[8:25] So and then today we will see who will be most interesting I think that’s the person with the most energy of this whole conference insane just the whole session he was well live coding then first of all which is boss-like nothing went wrong such speed just insane kept my attention the entire time I’ve seen there are some some session about the new spring so I will maybe try to look at that if there is still place in the room and if there’s not space enough there are a lot of sessions in parallel interesting session sometimes I look at the one that are the less attended so that I can maybe see something that I didn’t expect that sometimes they are interesting subject there so many I think doing some of the software productivity and AI it’s always interesting T J for the bugging and to KN in the features of the inell J so yeah looking forward for that today I intell one which was picking up there were few sessions on Java as well but the one which was interesting for me was one from James Gosling and one from wut and the new features of java

[9:37] 21 hello can I crash the party oh of course what brings you to ANP well Dex of course the beer and well we are here to enjoy the conference and he speakers sessions that you’re looking forward to particularly I think our colleagues probably looking forward most to the AI sessions and of course the Java 21 sessions they’re very enthusiastic about that so yeah but that’s almost every talk is good so yeah I also wanted to know why people attended Devo and how many times they already did that just my curiosity about technology and the fact that I can meet different people and connect to different companies it’s not just that I want to learn one thing but it’s getting inspired and getting a lot of energy actually here M that works for me every year it’s very common here to just step up to somebody and start a conversation and it’s not like no no no you’re not one of my colleagues I won’t talk to you but it’s really open and so it’s really nice to meet people from other countries and yeah other IDs so that’s what I love about Devo it’s great to meet people to see other type of what we doing

[10:58] Every day so new technologies new I AI typically that it’s not allowed in our company for the moment so that’s great I think it’s the sixth seventh time that I’m here so yeah it’s nice now this my first time in devox okay so I’ve been to other conferences but this first time here so and you enjoying it I came here last year and I had been learning new things in Java I was interested to join this year as well it’s also interesting to learn how Java is being used you’re a Java developer yourself yes yeah yes what is the most used framework at your company I guess spring wood what version of java are you on 17 but we want to go to 21 is Java one of the courses that you get at high school yes we had yava for two years now and now we’re in our third year or last year how do you look at all these Evolutions with chat GPT and how this could maybe impact your future job yeah I think it will impact our job yeah I’m looking forward to it but we still need to see how it will evolve and I’m not quite sure yet how it will help us we already heard the organizer and visitors so let’s bring in

[12:20] Some of the speakers and start with Anon aripov from jet brains what are you looking for with that Devo that’s a tough question you ask me on the spot I have to make up the answer to talk to people they could ask questions we could learn from them what is important so we could learn how to answer and you’re seeing a lot of people today and the next days yes yes a lot so you get a lot of IDs and a lot of improvements probably for your software in the future sure I hope to stay with my voice today hope not to lose it upstairs on the long working tables between the various rooms and in the exhibitor hall I bumped into many other speakers you’ll hear Bruno borgas Sean Phillips iar grimstad Paul and Gail Anderson Mario Fusco Ronnie do and Nikolai parlock yeah absolutely hi my name is Bruno Borges and I’m Brazilian I live in Canada and I work for with Java for 20 plus years and yous also known as the Jamal guy I’m the yo Garden yes I protect developers from Yo as much as I can you’re part of my presentation tomorrow because of that awesome looking forward to it and can you introduce yourself

[13:43] Sure I’m Sean Phillips I am from near Washington DC in the United States I work for the John Hopkins University Applied Physics lab and I’ve been working with Java for about 20 years and people may know you from javax and really awesome stuff in 3D yeah one of my Specialties is working with Java effects and doing 3D visualizations for numerical analysis that sort of stuff nerdy stuff you know but I think at a conference like this nerdy stuff is not a problem it I seem to fit in and there’s a lot of goobers here so you know it’s a requirement yeah it’s a requirement at this time what do you like about this conference because I think you do a lot in the year I think like the one of the cool areas of this conference is definitely this table right like for many years this is what we have I mean of course besides all the content and all the people that come to watch and all the presenters but this hack space is one of the cool areas like like Sean and I are just hacking stuff here having fun and that’s where we got to do a lot of the networking so just the opportunity to connect with people

[14:46] In real life it’s definitely a big deal so what you’re hacking here will be a next presentation yeah actually yes we are working on some stuff around machine learning AI large language models 3D visualization of AI data all that cool things yeah it’s it’s pretty much what we do I guess machine learning AI the buzzword do we have to be afraid as developers of what’s coming to us and taking away our job maybe I don’t think so because these these AI systems they can produce a lot of stuff but most of it it’s just it’s just well a lot of times it’s crap and then stuff that’s not crap it takes a developer to be able to look at it and say validate that it’s going to actually work and guess what the more they use these machine learning models to generate code the more of it that goes in the system that nobody actually wrote so if you think maintenance is difficult now it’s going to be an order of magnitude harder if nobody actually wrote it and then somebody has to go in and fix it so if anything we’re going to be in more demand in another couple years to the point where they’re going to have to pay

[15:53] Us more to go in and fix the AI generated code it’s just a matter of time yeah what session are you looking forward to join yourself oh boy there’s so many and I was really surprised at how many were honestly Brunos because one of the things that Bruno and I’m not I’m not I’m not just kissing your butt right now it’s true it’s true I’m kissing this butt a little bit but I he they’re going his him and his team are going to talk about their semantic KL service which is really this really strong from what I can tell a strong API wrapper but also a formalized pipeline type infrastructure for using open AI apis and we use open AIS apis a ton at work and what we need is something that’s more rigorous more formal and more testable than just well here’s some lines of code maybe in a script maybe in some Java let’s just connect to the service on the open Internet that that’s not sustainable from a from an Enterprise perspective his stuff his work is going to make it get more sustainable and we’re already using open ai’s API so why not have a more rigorous interface to it perfect

[17:07] Same question for you what session are you looking forward to and it just doesn’t have to be his no it’s not his for sure of course not no kidding anybody working with Java facts and AI should should follow Sean I like his presentation and I’m also looking forward to watch a kubernetes presentation not for the amount of emo but for the opportunity for Java developers to understand more about kubernetes and also how they do observability of java applications and pay attention cuz we have some data like 60 to 70% of java applications in the cloud are run inside containers so a Java developer has to know about containers has to know about kubernetes it has to know about how to observe the JVM so they can get the most out of the JVM so any talk about Java on kubernetes should be on every Java developer track and I’m sure they will find enough sessions here oh yeah for sure yes I have a couple of talks I had one yesterday and above and I have one talk in an hour now so yeah I’m I’m here as a speaker and what’s your main topic my main topic is about jakara e but today I’m kind of doing a

[18:21] Twist of it with where I do a spring boot migration from version two to three and I show how jakara e is a is kind of affecting all of that migration process this is a great conference everyone tells me I know it is what’s your main reason to be here I mean it’s the biggest Java event in Europe so it is the place to be and I try to go go to Every Devo I have the chance to go to and Devo Belgium is obviously one of my top choices Java is evolving very fast with this six month recycle Jakarta A2 how do you look at all these Evolutions that are going on I think it’s very good it shows that the community is very vibrant we’re catching up a little from other languages and Frameworks and if you look at jakar in particular the previous version was based on Java se1 we are can run on 21 and 17 but with Jakari 11 we are basing on Java 21 so it shows that we are also kind of following this faster pace of evolution and I think I see a more update in the industry now for newer Java versions faster than previously so I think we’re slowly but learning yeah that was mentioned during

[19:38] One of the talks yesterday that if you stick to a certain Java version which is a bit older that you’re not profiting from all these evolutions and all these new methods that are becoming available exactly and it’s not only about the language itself it’s about the JVM so by just upgrading your Java version you will probably experience in for his performance so you don’t even have to touch your code because it’s backwards compatible so you can just drop your code in a newer JVM and it’s faster okay thanks for all your work for Jakarta thank you very much and it has inspired spring I think and then involve influenced how spring is working yeah or maybe not influenced but at least got the attention that how dependent spring and how much it builds on jakar E so when we did the namespace change which has kind of Ripple through the ecosystem spring was very much affected by it but since we did this careful approach by just doing the names space in One release and then starting evolving the apis I think we made the migration process easier and we’re kind of seeing now that spring developers are

[20:45] Doing the migration they discover how much Jakari e is in the bottom of spring as well I find a lot of java vixo here ah hey how are you doing hello welcome to ANP yeah great we’re really happy to be here we brought the California weather with us because it was very warm I was in shorts yesterday yeah we’re not used to that kind of temperature here in Belgium but yeah yeah but I have my umbrella this morning so it’s so this is our first time back here to devox since 2016 so it’s and we’re seeing a lot of the same people that we that we know and like and so we’re we’re looking forward we’re doing our session on tomorrow and your session is about Java vix right Java effects with glue on mobile so we have an app in the app store well the article I wrote for Foojay kind of like going into that and then an additional one called whish which is based on the world game so we show a lot of java effects customizations that are possible so thanks for bringing Java vix love back to devox oh yeah yeah so we’ve been we’ve been doing Java effects for a

[21:55] While so it’s it’s always fun it’s just that’s what I like about it it’s it’s a fun platform to use what kind of applications do you see being developed in javax well with a lot of the desktop is still a very popular forum for that there’s a lot of that going on you don’t hear about it but the desktop applications are people have moved away from swing and they and on to Java effects and what we’re what we’re doing is we’re showing people that you can do mobile development like like we just said with Java effects as well but the desktop applications out there are getting more sophisticated and Java effects is a good fit for that what other sessions are you looking forward to at this conference we spent the last three hours doing the growl VM Deep dive since Java effect for mobile uses grow VM we thought H good thing to learn more about it but so that that’s top on my mind at the moment I don’t know yeah and then we’re also going to be looking at some of the Java 21 release features that are going on and we’re looking forward to U James Gosling’s going to be get here

[23:06] We just talked to him and he’s doing a session here as well and of course Brian gets we’re going to try and get to his stuff as much as we can as well but those are the ones we’re looking forward to what brings you to ANP the dev as usual it’s it’s the greatest Conference of the I mean this is the equivalent of my cistas week right it’s it’s the best Conference of the year and I always enjoy the you know it’s really a family and moreover you know working remotely for a moment you are always in front of your computer and that’s all so and I’m a sou Italian person and so you know I really really need to stay in touch with people physically yes you’re also a speaker I’m also a speaker yes I gave a talk about profiling a deep dive about profiling the first day on Monday and yesterday evening I gave a talk about my experiments with virtual threads which is the new things on the jav virtual machine so it’s very interesting and yes now I’m done with it so I can enjoy the rest of the conference so now you’re becoming an attendee yes yes I’m a pure attendee so

[24:21] I’m going to attend the talk of my colleague ol on she’s she’s really really good as well so I’m eager to go there and see what she has okay there’s a few minutes left so I let you go to the room thanks a lot sorry we are attacking you just before your talk are you prepared absolutely not you are making last minute changes of course it wouldn’t be interesting otherwise it was like do I want to endanger everything by making a big change to show something cool or not and of course I went with the risky Choice what is your talk about it’s about continuous feedback so basically how developers can actually take information they already have about their code in runtime and use it to improve their code so if you think about it usually do you don’t really know what’s going on with your code after you push it into production and this is about actually getting some of that information in order to be able to improve it with faster Loops good luck with the talk and have fun thanks what brings you to ANP I got a speak here at a conference this one actually I was I gave my talk yesterday and what is

[25:34] The main topic that you’re talking about so in general I talk about new Java features specifically now I talked about Java 21 or rather everything that happened between 17 and 21 so that was a deep dive session of 3 hours we took a little break so two and a half hours of just Java features Java features there’s so much even two and a half hours wasn’t enough I can imagine because 21 was a very big one yeah right so not only like right so specifically 21 was just huge with pattern matching and virtual threats being finalized so that was like a big one but also there has been some other changes like smaller ones in the last couple versions and many people go from a version with long-term support to the next one so many know they aren’t 17 or 11 now they’re looking at 21 for maybe later this year or early next year and of course there’s a lot of interest in there right and for many of them they’re getting all those features at once and just pattern matching virtual threats are so huge one of them really changing the way we can develop we don’t have to right we can do still good old oriented

[26:28] Programming but we can mix in pattern matching there and we can even go much more functional if you want to that’s that’s a big change in everyday development life which is always fun like lamb does back in the days but virtual threats really changed the whole platform and how scalable it is and how it can be used and where and that will really change a lot as well and also for new projects that might have used reactive in the past and we not consider virtual threats so I think Java 21 is just like an amazing release yeah thank you for bring coming to ANP and telling this story yeah yeah I’m glad to be here thank you for the invitation and what is the interaction with the guests here sorry the interaction with the guests it’s great I was just here we just talked a little bit about everyday work in different companies and it’s it’s good A lot of people talk to me and one big question I get is Nikolai that’s all great that you’re talking about but how can I go past Java 81 right how do I convince the management or convince Tech leaders in our company about that and that’s that’s

[27:25] A recurring discussion we just had this conversation but I always had today once and yesterday like twice and yeah so yeah I think this the truth is that many companies out there do not adopt a new version within a couple months or even a couple years and yeah that’s I’m what can to say like I don’t work in I don’t work in that environment anymore so to me that just feels a little bit sad I’m like I hope for people to be able to use these new features because they’re fun but also because they’re going to make them more productive they’re going to make the apps better and so yeah and that was but there have been a recurring conversation a lot I have to apologize to rato kakan as I put a microphone in front of his nose just minutes before he had to start a three-hour session in one of the largest rooms of devox can I interrupt two minutes before your presentation yes yes are you ready I’m ready everything prepared yeah I’m prepared are you a bit nervous a little bit but I know when I started I get I cool down okay it’s always like that is this a short session or 3our session it’s a

[28:27] Three-hour session yes it’ll be quite long I will make a break 50 minutes probably but it’s but I can talk for very long time I can do it and how do you feel three hours is that a combination of information and demos yeah I will have some short demos but it will be more lots of information design principles go into how we implement it on our company how other people have implemented as well other other organization so I go in detail about what it’s needed to have to build Event souret Systems I give a few demos but it’s more content more abstract level not a lot of codes let’s return to the exhibitor hall one last time to learn what Samy egl of vadin my colleague mariama of aul and the redhead team are doing good morning are you doing a live demo yeah we are doing a live demo what is being so special about being an exhibitor here at devox I think that the best thing is that there are a lot of Java developers and we have a product for Java developers so it kind of makes sense to be here hello welcome welcome at devox thank you what are you looking forward

[29:44] To here at evox getting to know the new trends and what’s cool about Java and yeah the whole ecosystem how do you feel about being here at the boot of one of the sponsors and getting a demo of the people who build all these products that’s very cool very interesting I hope we get to make it work because now it’s not but yeah you know it’s it’s part of the demo demo effect and so yeah that’s what the demo is meant to be should should not be working yeah exactly yeah but you have the guys who build it so they can help you yeah we can this here is the 20th anniversary so Azul is really pleased to sponsor it and yeah I’m here with my team mhm so you get here in contact with the community how do you feel about all these nerds walking around here it’s just amazing for me it’s by far my favorite conference happening in Europe so I’m really really pleased to be here for the second year yeah in a row what are you giving away today we have stickers and we have red fedoras and I think the hats are very popular we’re H we love to see it how much are you giving

[30:54] Away we have a thousand hats that we’re giving away there’s one place at Devo that not many people get to see let me take you to the audiovisual room upstairs under the roof of the K police this really looks like the Beating Heart of devox yeah it is we have all the screens that comes in and sends out to the rooms so every room is controlled from here yeah that’s correct and we can make overflows and routing and recordings and yeah so that’s from here that all the videos also get uploaded to YouTube so today we yes that’s my colleagues are their part they do the editing and afterwards we upload them I heard there are even special Beamers because the cinema projectors is not good enough for Devo yeah we do the projection in 4k and most of the cinema proor are still 2K so yeah I heard there was a little accident Sunday with one of the devices yeah we had some raindrops in the console so we had some smoke and yeah the console broke down special effects but not wanted yeah I like that be we were happy it was just on Sunday actually so we are here looking at the screen with

[32:09] All the presentations what did you learn about Java nothing I’m not understanding a word still 18 years I think and as promised I have one more interview to share for a lot of visitors including me it was a real privilege to meet James Gosling in person and he is just as friendly as the whole Java Community how do you like Devo well it’s in antp so therefore it’s good as Belgium it’s even better well you know it’s the land of good beer and good chocolate you your title on the website is the father of java I had nothing to do with that but imagine being the father how proud are you of your child I went past proud a long time ago I’m amazed astonished puzzled it’s just it’s freaking cool but it wasn’t I mean you know in terms of my lifespan it was my baby for like three years and that ended like decades ago you say a baby Now is really a grownup it’s many many many years now how do you look at all the evolutions that are going on in Java oh they’re they’re they’re they’re pretty much entirely very cool mhm you know all the stuff that

[33:44] Shown up in the later JDK releases you know I mean some of its language features but I got to say some of the stuff that’s the most impressive is the under the hood performance stuff particularly the GC it’s really transformed the way people start doing some of the more exotic and weird weird stuff you know High transaction rate stuff where people really care about being as deterministic as possible and yeah it’s a big move from being an embedded language in the beginning running on setup boxes for instance to now controlling the world let’s say yeah but you know when you’ve got like stock exchanges and giant code bases at places like FedEx and you know pretty much every Bank on the planet and lots of cloud services It’s actually kind of scary you know the you know when Y2K happened a lot of people their solution to the Cobalt problem with the two-digit years was to rewrite stuff in Java and as the guy who wrote Java Lang date the Y2K Eve was tense MH I want to thank you the name of all the Java developers for the language that you created thank you it’s really

[35:34] Amazing and to be part of this community is really amazing yeah yeah well and to be here at devox again it’s like what 20 years 25 years 20 years it’s only 20 years yeah you get a t-shirt now with 20 on it ah yeah no yeah so I’ve been here fairly regularly you know and sometimes I think I mostly come here for the beer but you know okay that’s a nice conclusion thanks a lot all right thanks I had much fun at devox and I hope this report brought you some of the joy thanks for listening to or watching this podcast keep an eye on Foojay for more OpenJDK news and updates till next time give me a give me a j give me the friends of OpenJDK