Foojay Podcast #34: J-Fall Report, Part 2

Transcript

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[0:00] This is part two of our jall report let’s learn more about developer practices open rewrite machine learning and certification welcome to the FJ podcast all your news about OpenJDK on November the 9th I had several interviews with the speakers and guests of the jall conference in the Netherlands last week in episode 33 of the Foojay podcast I combined the interview views about Evolutions in Java towards the cloud and sustainability in this part we will touch on a variety of topics more related to the developers life let’s start with Tom and elen two outstanding speakers about maintainable code I have two next guests who are you and what are you doing at jall so I’m going to let elen start I’m El and I work at infos support and today I’m here with Tom to talk about leaving a legacy or how to be kind to the people who will have to maintain your code okay and you are I know you but yeah yeah slightly slightly so I’m H Tom kls I’m also an engineer at info supports and also the Belgian Java user group lead no no no I love the anic I learned a lot from them and today I’m indeed

[1:25] Presenting a session with elen and it kind of Grew From the fact that I often get sent to Brownfield project that we end up maintaining so I try to fix it up a bit so elen has a better time maintain it because elen is in the maintenance team so I literally hand things over to elen so if the software that I hand over to her is crap then she makes something beautiful out of it no no no yeah yeah she will but it actually hurts her I’m hurting El and if you can put a face to it becomes quite quite a bit more difficult to get to ship as they say yeah yeah and you have a session which is quite dramatic because I’ve seen it at Vox Vox in Brussels yeah I think after our V session someone came up to us and said I’m going to sue you because I’m traumatized for emotional damage but that person is not working for us so also true was not that bad no as you know we always provid Belgian chocolates afterwards to reduce the emotional pain that we’ve caused but it’s a very important session and I think that’s everyone should should come watch it your talk still has to happen

[2:38] Yeah in what time 11:40 it’s on the so I can see it in the back I can see it in the back in one hour so you’re you’re relaxed nervous still kind of relaxed still kind of relaxed okay yeah I think we’ve done it quite a few times now this session the only thing I’m I’m really a bit stressed about is the emotional part if you’ve seen it you know what I mean because that real still really affects me mentally so that is something that I need to get over but once we’re past that part because smooth and you are in the cinema so probably get an Oscar for [Laughter] your yeah well it’s it is an award-winning performance everyone should come watch it your speakers boats what do you do the rest of the day are you mingling with other people do you want to see talks what is your goal of this date yeah I think we want to see some other talks and just mingle with the rest of the Java Community something specific you want to see that’s on your list there’s too much to choose from I know yeah I must say the content density is quite incredible this year thanks to this guy

[4:04] So if you just look at the slot that we’re presenting so the 1140 slot all the other speakers are like wow I would want to watch all those sessions but we can’t because we need to go to our own session and I have the same feeling with every every slot like a bunch of different sessions difficult to choose and we do need to leave a bit earlier today so there’s a few sessions that we won’t even be able to follow but and you’re missing the drink yeah Rim is the drink so but sacrifices need to be made for the new life at home with a baby H how important at a conference is the social contact finding people with the same Java mind I think it’s very important if I see U because I’m I’m really new to the Java Community but if I see how Tom interacts with everyone and knows everyone and when there’s a problem with like elastic search or when he needs to know something about open shift and he just knows who he needs just from this kind of conferences so that’s that’s pretty cool I guess yeah yeah so the secret Pathways to unclear documentation is just writing one of the death roll

[5:15] People and saying hey I have this problem I can’t find it in your documentation I help them because I’m signaling a problem and they help me and especially for me and you know this as well since you’re helping organizing the BJ having contacts in the Java world it’s so much easier to go hey we had lunch or dinner at some conference you want to come over to the BJ and come speak so this is partially for info support but for me personally also a good way to network and find new speakers to direct with her next to Belgium if we can get them that far and it’s only a few hours from here so three and a half from ANP approximately this morning yeah you mentioned ANP that’s the reason that’s not the problem not this was okay maintainable code is very crucial as it can be a critical factor in your job satisfaction that things can go wrong and how this impacts your life was the topic of my next guest lella she is a c developer so we also exchange ideas about different programming languages hi I’m lers I’m a Microsoft mvp. NET consultant and also a speaker

[6:29] And today I’m speaking about burnout and how as developers we can get into burnout and how we can also get out of there and is that a personal story that you’re telling personal story about how I got burnout and also how I survived burnout that’s why it’s called surviving and thriving because Tom Co that I know from the Belgium J he has a similar talk in the past yeah burnout is really something which can happen fast in the software development environment yeah is it based because of frustration of the company that you’re in about the organization maybe it can be of course the organization and the workload that you have or not being able to plan well too much work maybe colleagues that don’t always listen to you can also of course be a mix of different things it could also be physical health together with your work or maybe it could be family life together if you work but that just becomes too much to mix a match M that happens a lot most of the time it’s a mix between multiple parts of your life yeah I think there’s not not a simple solution but what are some tips that can help people to

[7:46] Prevent this well of course knowing the science helps a lot knowing or realizing that you’re constantly under stress and that causes headaches or fatigue or that you can sleep well those are most of the time the signs that you have burnout or are almost at the burnout and once you think you’re actually at burnout how eff scary that is seek professional help yeah okay you mentioned you are a c developer yes so you’re here in the evil Camp of J Java or how do you look at intr you’re an intruder no I been going to Java meetings before because I just know people that do Java and of course do n and Java aren’t that fair very yeah very close cousins so people know people so I went to Java meetups and then went to go to jall as a normal F last year and now I’m here as a speaker yeah what sessions did you already attend yourself or you want to attend still what I want to take I’m mostly go to the methology kind of sessions because of course Java I don’t speak that language so that’s a little bit difficult but yeah I’ve been just been walking in and

[9:10] Out of room seeing what’s up and mostly just a mology yeah also always welcome to switch sides you can still go from to Java the exhibitors is that also something which you can find can learn from yeah of course there are a lot of different parties here here that also have a lot of different Technologies going on there also quite a few that have Java as well as net or Java with AER together so I can talk with them so also Microsoft poof which of course also very good for me because Microsoft NP and yeah just talking around seeing what everybody’s up to what they like which Technologies they use because often times just don’t think about what’s going on what’s going on behind the scenes of a website that you may be F quite often so it’s a bit special Microsoft is here yeah Microsoft is one of the driving forces now of java of the evolutions in Java I have been doing C development also in the past yeah how do you look at is this a competition I don’t think so I think people at some point in the life especially in the Netherland or at least developers pick kind of a site and

[10:22] Specialize that so most of the time in the Netherlands that will be either PHP Java or do net you can’t really mix them all the time it’s better to just pick one and just roll with it so I think most people that are now in Java will stay in Java and most people that are right now in C will stay in C and most people that are now don’t PP will stay in PP so you have a bit the story about being a full stack developer knowing everything it’s something I don’t believe in personally you cannot know everything you can know a lot but you cannot be an expert in many different topics yeah that’s true and also just contact switching all the time is not good for you so and probably also not good direction of burnout and getting bored of your job even yeah so that’s okay I wish you good luck with the session thank you we are in the same time slot so I cannot join you again the multitude of sessions at the same time is a problem thanks a lot have fun and good luck with the session thank you bye one way to prevent work overload is to use existing stuff in instead of Reinventing it don’t try

[11:31] To build everything yourself and that’s the topic of willam’s talk I’m Willam and I’m here today to talk in ignite session actually it’s very short five minute talk and I’m gonna explain today about the Ikea effect and the Ikea effect is that you have something which cannot assemble have you ever been to Ikea oh yeah I don’t like it you don’t how do you what is the feeling what do you have for feeling when you you’ve built something oh that’s amazing when you succeed in building something actually and there’s a psychological effect which is called the Ikea effect it means that if you’ve built something yourself it’s better because the effect of the excitement continues in your brain the next time you visit the Ikea so can we reflect that on code I think so we want to build everything ourself yeah we do I know it has the not invented here syndrome not NH true but it’s a bit it’s it’s it’s slightly different because the effect of Ikea effect is not on the negative side most of the time the not invented hair syndrome is when you’re afraid of using somebody else’s code that’s not what the

[12:57] Ikea effect is about the Ikea effect is more about I’m proud of writing my own code i’ I’m proud of what I’ve what I’ve built and I’m going to explain what you can what happened to me and I’ve had the Ikea effect multiple times in my career so far you build something because you think yeah this has never done before and you want to create it yourself but let’s be honest and then almost everything has already been done true is available most of the times is open source on GitHub yes exactly maybe in these people should start thinking about can I maybe help someone else and talk to your community exactly yes and if you can make it better please do not reinvent the wheel do not try to make your own Library which is slightly better than the other one no let’s try to make this one better because this one works already let’s make it better and maybe learn from being part of an open source project exactly and step over over your feeling of I’m proud of my own Library it’s it’s my child I raised it I created it yes you can be proud but it’s not always smart to build

[14:14] It yourself so it’s a five minute talk yes if people blink they have missed half of it probably you have a few slides I it’s well an night talk is actually exactly five minutes and exactly 20 slides no more no less So it’s 15 seconds per slide and if you miss some words or you trip over over your pronunciation I hope it happens I hope it’s recorded I want to see it I hope it’s it’s it’s being recorded as well and in the end the crowd will enjoy so I hope you have fun today thank you fun with the other sessions fun with session and this short talk okay thank you have a good day one tool that can help you prevent doing unneeded work is open rewrite and I’ll talk about it with my next guest my name is s to and I’m a Staff software engineer at M and I’m here to give a presentation on using the M CLI to upgrade applications and later this afternoon I’ll give a workshop on upgrading your applications for to spring with three worship are you the one who is filling the whole afternoon yes so I I’m missing three quarters of the program just from that one workshop and my presentation but I’ll be just yeah

[15:39] Helping folks upgrade to the latest version because you have about three weeks left until there’s no more open source support on Spring boot 2.7 or 3.0 and open rewrite can help there y absolutely so we have open is an a framework for safe code modifications and we allow users to run recipes to do modifications to their sour code to upgrade any kind of classes that have been moved any properties that have been renamed and all kinds of changes in that way I’ve seen a talk at devox by Simon verven yes he also talked about this it’s a really hot topic it’s a it’s a really we’re getting a lot more engagement nowadays it’s well I think at def Belgium we had three speakers on open rewind and we’ve even had talks over over laap where multiple people from the community are presenting on this topic now so really cool to be part of that yeah so it’s a very good thing if people from the community are giving talks and you don’t have to do it anymore I or is that a bad thing I used to be a Community member just presenting on this and then at the start of this year I joined the company so

[16:48] Yeah that that’s actually nice s we had it in the podcast before so by joining an open source project and contributing to that project it became your job yeah it’s it’s my job to do this and that also means that you don’t have to take time away from your regular job to do this but it’s actually you can use all the time you have to yeah present the conferences to reach out things and did you find a new pet project because your pet project became your work now my pet project is helping others to get started with this so reaching out to other well-known Frameworks to get them to contribute repes for their s software and that’s what I like best about this is reaching out to folks and seeing how they use it I think it was in the presentation by Simon he was showing going from an Old Spring boot application to a newer one and you have all these recipes in between who is writing these recipes so we luckily have a lot of community involvement there so we also have a collaboration with the folks at V where they sometimes write their own recipes and contribute them back to us

[17:57] Re write our recipes when customers ask us to do that but we also have a lot of folks from the community who find that something was missed here I need to do it another 100 times so I’m giving you a recipe that we can then distribute and yeah have everyone now being able to automate that change I didn’t look into the recipes themselves how difficult are they codes are they texts it depends so it depends we have it in every interview yeah we have three different ways you can Define recipes so the simplest one is use a pre-existing recipe and add some configuration so if you need to rename a method or swap some arguments or rename a class or a package all of that we have building blocks for that you can configure and combine and just with a just a yl file where you say rename this for me rename that and all those together do a complete migration so that can be a spring application or a apach HTP client migration and all of that is just plain y files then the second one we have is similar to reaster which you might know from eror prone where you get two annotated

[19:08] Methods and we from the before template you supply and the after template of what you want to replace we work out the details in between if you need more than that we have a custom visitor that you can Implement to yeah migrate your projects in with the full flexibility of the Java language Okay so definitely project to take it’s yeah it’s it’s it’s very easy to get started we have a lot of community involvement and it’s just it’s it’s my biggest Hobby and now my job as well and do you have content on Foojay about this subject do you already have content about this on Foojay Foojay I think Simon has has cont and I’m planning to do a small blog about upgrading to Spring boot 3 now that support is running out because a lot po now finally are stopping to put it off and actually have to put in the work okay so always welcome to be an author you know that it’s also an invitation to everyone else if they have content for Foojay they can add it there many visitors attend conferences to learn what is evolving within the language and runtime developers need to keep up with new Evolutions but also

[20:18] Teachers educating the next generation of developers need to be informed ala is one of them hi I’m ala funder fan I’m I’m actually a teacher at the University of applied science in rdam and we’re teaching Java and a lot of other languages but here I’m mostly for Java with a couple of students okay and what do you want to learn today here at the jold my main goal is to see the newest yeah developments in Java but I’m also really interested in AI as a personal interest and another goal is to find guest speakers for our per educational system H you say that you’re using Java in your education yeah how important is Java versus other languages well actually Java is our main points as as I could say Your mother language because yeah like in Belgium I’m from Belgium I see that there a lot of schools are choosing for CP do you see some differences in how you can use these languages well we’re technical Informatica so we’re programming robots and that stuff we have also Informatica track they are using a lot of C but we have to

[21:40] Be different the biggest question at our track is more python or Java yeah that’s the bigger issue yeah I was at devox I saw talk about the Lang chain for J which is a Java library to do machine learning is that the kind of stuff you also use already in education I would like to but that’s far from the reality so that’s actually the reason I’m here because years ago I started AI master myself and there was just Pon yeah while I was I knew only Java so I tried to start it in Java but it was really hard and actually unknown and new yeah so I’m happy to hear that there are a lot of java libraries yeah there’s a lot of stuff going on in that yesterday at the speaker lunch I had a small discussion about there is no bad language in education you need to know the principles of programming but someone said yeah but python doesn’t teach you the things about objectoriented and type safety is that also something you take into consideration well there is no bad language if you choose wisely because you can try to do to program heart machine with C or something.net or you can try to

[23:03] Program an user interaction program with hosal which don’t accept input and output that’s bad language but in other cases it can be just the perfect language yeah like in all software discussion it depends yeah it depends a lot Al wants to learn more about machine learning and AI one of those hot topics at each conference these days luckily we have lutka who has a talk about it and shares her insights it’s coffee break time so there’s a lot of people around here yeah but who are you and what are you doing at jall H I’m l i work voluminous and today I had the early bir session about machine learning 101 machine learning one of the Hot Topics yeah it is now with J GTP and G it’s all the big Hy yeah and was it really Java related machine learning or more BR topping no it was in Python I thought maybe I should do it in Java but I thought let’s stick to the plan and just do it in Pyon they accepted my proposition with Pyon so yeah and why do you still do it in Python and not in Java are there things missing what I experience is in Python it’s easier to understand and it’s a one-on-one topic even it’s Jaa so

[24:17] Big Java conference and there are more libraries in Pon that are already there and it’s much faster so for the little bit of time it’s easier do lifetime Real Time with h with python okay at devox I saw talk about L chain for J yeah so Lang chain is a python Library if I’m correct and it supports to Java are you seeing more evolutions of machine learning for Java yeah when you saw like five years ago it’s like horrible don’t do machine learning in Java it’s not built for it and now you see like yeah Java has a big community and went Le to do something in our own language so now you see more and more is in the Java things like with the long chain and all that kind of stuff so yeah I can see the shift but I’m not really convinced with there yet to do it optimized Java okay what do you do with machine learning what are you using it for yeah a lot of things I in my talk for example I’m talking about how I got into machine learning with just a hobby project but I’m also talking there about that nine of out of 10 times machine learning isn’t the solution or AI we

[25:36] Think it’s very cool it is very cool but most of the time you forget there’s a lot of data cleaning H and organizing to do before you can start and that takes so much time and effort and money you can better just write yeah normal goates a lot of FS so yeah one of the answers is I don’t do a lot of it because most of the time the answer for the solution is not machine learning or II at all a lot of machine learning chat GPT Lang LS language models should we be afraid as a programmer for our job no no if you’re now afraid of your job I think most of the things that are repetive is going to fall out so we have more time for Creative Solutions and that kind of things if you’re not doing that right now you probably should change jobs and do other stuff so I think we only have more time to do the stuff you want and de dive into the complexity and the stuff so no no that all do you ask chat GPT for code examples if you’re coding yeah if I’m stuck I do because I yeah it’s like a rubber duck but it answers also so and if it’s not a sensitive code at all of course but yeah I use it

[26:56] When I’m stuck and does it help you do you get the right answers sometimes but it’s still I Ed free version and hallucinating a lot so yeah I use it for inspiration I’m stuck and I’m asking a question and then give something and maybe it’s not the right question of right answer but I can do something with it and go on for there so yeah not for the solution but for the thinking Pro to help you and if you guys Su there are a lot of sessions today did you join other ones yeah I did join some other ones one about profiling and some ignite sessions and one about what was the other one so bad I didn’t yeah I tried to join also other sessions but it’s also Community things so a lot of people and networking so sometimes I miss one because I’m talking with so many people who like oh the session is already halfway true so yeah profiling one is seems to be very popular a lot of people went there the it was very P the yeah it gives you a lot more insight into your application yeah I’m not an expert but that’s what I learned here by asking to people we have still a few sessions to go you have an idea what you

[28:12] Will be joining h no not at all that’s very bad but no no it’s a constant everyone yeah I select that a l moment yeah me too yeah so many amazing sessions at the same time you can just join whatever you want yeah and sometimes you think I go to that session and it’s already packed and was like I’ll watch it later and I go for another session now or network of see it sponsores or something like that yeah a lot of people here you’re you’re from the Netherlands yeah I’m from the Netherlands so there are a lot of people here you probably know from other companies and yeah a lot of old colleagues and people from school and all the stuff or people from G and or just the common jav Community I see all the people so yeah every more and more come faces okay to close this part of the j4 review we’ll look at the new tool in development for Foojay as work is ongoing to extend the site with a certification tool and that’s a subject I discussed with Roy who has a long jall history I’ve been here I think for the 12th or 13th time and used to be in the board and I helped organize J

[29:23] I think up to three years ago so have been as P last few years which is a lot of fun because instead of worrying about organization you get to talk to people and jooy the conference itself and the cool thing now is that I actually get to do a talk later in the afternoon so that’s very I think it’s very cool after being in organization so many years and I get Go on stage yes and your talk is about so the talk is titled how good of a developer are you and actually has a link to PJ maybe in interesting to tell so U working with some people on the P.J Community on a test that is able to measure programming skills instead of actual knowledge like you get youp exam and there’s a lot of research actually behind the platform that we’re using for this so can tell a bit about that yeah and I know the subject a bit I didn’t do the test yet myself that you are developing I don’t dare to do that yeah it’s always a little bit scary right I if I was in a job interview and I got this kind of java questions where I had to think like a compiler then I just block because these are not the

[30:38] Questions that you as a Java developer should know I think it’s really about how do you understand codes how do you write codes I think those are the important things and that’s exactly what you want to achieve I think that that’s really true and there’s a lot of debate around this issue I mean if you ask 10 different developers have probably come with 10 different things they think are really important to being a good developer I think most of them would agree it’s not it’s more like a practice something that you learn by doing and that you develop some intuition for how to approach a problem instead of being able to reproduce the exact steps in which programed by the compiler needs yeah sure for me my best job interview I ever had was the Java developer working on a product he gave me his laptop and said this is my code and I need to add this field to the database something like that do it and we just worked on it together and I think that gives you a much better view of how someone works and what they already know and that’s the kind of things you want to test

[31:49] Correct exactly and you know there’s also of course if you do setup like that there’s still like a sub objective components here because then you get hired based on what that specific Java develop things is the kind of behavior you can go another developer but it is testing practical knowledge some people might experience some pressure in such settings so I would say ideally you do have a setup like that where you have like a real world problem like the one you worked on but then in a like a neutral environment where you can work in your own place with the IDE that you like to work with and so that you so that you don’t have an idea somebody’s watching on my finger so that maybe that even more ideal but yeah but it’s I think really step forward to do it like that in instead of checking if somebody knows like the acronyms or can recollect how some kind of computer science search algorithm works and so on so yeah yeah so looking forward to that being added to Foojay and that brings us to the end of part two of my j4 review in the Following part in a few weeks you’ll learn more about the

[32:59] Maven project and repository and the impact on security concerns and we will have some battles with Java fix versus swing hotmix versus Tim Leaf versus Vaden and Juke versus hibernate keep an eye on Foojay for future articles and podcasts about development and everything related to the Java World thanks for listening give me a give me a j give me the friends of OpenJDK