Foojay Podcast #6: Welcome to Foojay!

Transcript

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[0:00] Hello and welcome to this new edition of the Foojay podcast today we’re gonna talk about Foojay itself the website for friends of open GDK welcome to the Foojay podcast all your news about OpenJDK in this episode we want to give you a look behind the curtains of Foojay.io the very first post on the website dates from April 2015 2020 and it was by here Tian Willingham let’s look back and what has happened on Foojay during the two and a half years since that first post and talk to some of the people behind the project hi I’m here John I’m one of the initiators of the Foojay project and I work at a zoo my name is I work as a senior software engineer at contrast security I’m a German country speaker and a writer of 4J that’s about me hi my name is Roy Vossen I’ve been involved well in the Java space for quite a while 15 to 20 years depending on how you count and been involved in many Java communities Java User Group also called motion and since a while I think for over a year also involved in Foojay through my company open value in Advisory Board and I’m also part of the certification committee at Foojay and I’m Franco Porter I’ve been

[1:22] Doing Java development for almost 15 years now I write on Foojay about Java on the Raspberry Pi and some experiments in that topic and just before the summer I joined Azul as a technical writer let’s start with the basics here John can you describe what Foojay is all about up until the point where we started this project April 2000 120 for many years there hadn’t been a central vendor neutral place for the Java community and what’s happened since Oracle took over sun is that very clearly there’s been a lot of innovation and growth and multiple releases you know four different releases of java per year and also there’s been a growth of vendors so now you can get Java from not just Oracle but also red hat or Azul or bellsoft or Amazon and about 10 other places so on the one hand that’s great that there’s been so much Innovation and so much growth and so much new releases and new vendors and Summit activity on the other hand it makes things quite confusing and so Azul thought in 2020 let’s put together a website together with other organizations who have this similar need for a coherent place

[2:36] And also as a service to the Java community and to new users in the Java world and so I joined the zoo specifically to work on this project and that’s that’s how it started and we’ve brought together a number of different organizations who have a similar interest in helping the Java community and it’s been a great process and one of the main goals of Vijay is to provide content around Java there’s at least one or even two articles per day being published who are all these contributors yes that’s interesting because we started with the idea of let’s provide clear lists of who the different vendors are of java because there isn’t one it isn’t Oracle it’s red hat Amazon bowelsoft and Azu etc etc and also we thought let’s provide clear lists of fixes because there are four releases per year but who knows what is in those four releases aside from the major release where you get you know the LTS release where you get a clear discussions and so on around that and release notes and things you don’t really know what’s going on in the other releases so that’s what we started with but then we realized hey okay so we have

[3:49] This the starting point but that would basically mean that once a quarter we would have new information on Foojay you know we need more content than that on a more regular Cadence and we also need to bring people on board and just as java.net back in the day had a blogging portion on its site we want to provide that possibility to the Java Community as well and so we have via select set up the possibility for people to interact with each other and to bring forth ideas and also to publish their content on Foojay so every Monday morning we put up a schedule and we discuss that together and whether we agree or disagree based on what’s in draft it’s all on WordPress and then we publish our content and we never knew really how much content we would want to publish and you don’t you don’t want to flood the humble Java developer who has many things to do in their life with you know dozens of Articles per day but instead probably you want to read one or two well thought about and well curated articles and that’s what we’ve been doing for the last two years on the blogging side bringing together one or two

[5:06] Articles per day from multiple different people from people like like the raid saying from Google and Matt Rabel from actor such as yourself a lot of content about Raspberry Pi and JavaFX comes from you Butler has amazing content around Java performance and Java threading and very long series about concurrency so anyone who has ideas or content whether it’s existed a long time or whether it’s completely new they can bring it together and just publish it on Foojay and it’s very low threshold very easy to get involved and get started with us and also we can refer now to a few of the Articles which are actually available on Foojay one is about the slack channel so you’re seeing there’s a lot of discussion on going on slack it’s not only about the publishing part that happens on slide there’s also more information being shared there yes in principle anyone can join in anyone doing anything with Java and if you have questions about Java maybe you’ve been going to stack Overflow or you’ve been going to all kinds of other places but what about having a slack Channel where you can ask your questions and

[6:10] Answer people’s questions and interact with each other as a community and that’s really what the future slack is about and it’s open to anybody to join in so it’s it’s the idea is really to collaborate and to bring content together and to bring people together around the common platform which is the OpenJDK in a completely vendor neutral way so it’s it’s it’s completely open to anyone to participate in together it’s not promoting any particular company more than any other particular company it’s it’s completely aimed at the Java Community having a place to bring its content together and to have a community platform around the OpenJDK and we also have an article that we can add to the show notes is how you can submit content to Foojay is having content on Foojay yourself but you’re also a reviewer what is your goal to participate in Foojay I see multiple branding it’s joining over here in Foojay first and foremost you know like region mentioned it’s it’s a community right it provides an excellent opportunity to make friends and that’s what I found I have I since I you know begin to

[7:23] Contribute over here I met some wonderful peoples and they became my friends and when you have friends you know you can share your ideas pretty easily compared to you know other people right you can ask help pretty easily so that’s what I have been greatly benefited from this Foojay community and secondly you know it’s just not about making friends it’s also you know be part of a professional Network right networks has numerous advantages I suppose we all know about it right you can gain access to Opportunities you can build or and raise your professional you know profiles you can build your personal Brands and so on I mean the benefits of the enormous and I have all you know active through this community so who’s a definitely you know assassinated in that and I was asked this question when I joined it here by one of the members so why you joined over here I say pretty much the same answer I want to make some friends and I did so yeah and apart from all of these or the other thing is we are constantly learning things through books through our experiences and many random thoughts are

[8:38] You know sort of racing through our heads but not all of them are you know in a concrete right but we know something concrete for sure finding we’re able to express them in words perhaps in writing right so that’s in fact proves our understanding whether we are clear or not when you were a master of the certain ideas or topics when you can teach others and you want you can teach others by many firms in creating videos writings and everyone has happens to have different way or medium to each other so personally I like writing so that’s why you know I always come up with the ideas of writing I can give you a concrete example for example you know I was confident that I had a good understanding of java contagency however it wasn’t until I started writing about it right so I realized that I have a wide area of things that I don’t know or I have you know lackings so then I you know go back and study those things again so I realized those things from writing so in another way the this methods is you know if you start writing it will help you to determine whether you are

[9:51] Unpaired on a particular topic or you are if or not so yeah these are all these benefits I found joining in this you know I mean I personally benefited a lot from me so I’ll definitely continue to contribute as much as I can and make continue making friends like you all I can fully agree I’ve done the same I was writing about Java and Raspberry Pi which is a very specific topic it were all things I was learning myself and then by exchanging the same content as on my own blog but also on Foojay indeed you can have a wider audience and people have you get more feedback is this really a good explanation then I wrote These articles because I was learning myself and then exchanging that information of Vijay is indeed a great opportunity and I think also Butler is a very interesting use case here because Puzzler is now working at contrast security Now correct me if I’m wrong bustler but it’s because you were involved in Foojay or at least partly because of that you met Eric Oslo who at the time was working at contrast security and through that interaction between yourselves you managed to get a

[11:03] You know a placement a job at in that organization in the meantime he’s joined the zoo but it’s really a place where you can interact with people and you discover that there are jobs available in different places and because of your interactions and because of the kind of content you provide people kind of learn what your interests are and they can figure out for themselves whether that fits into the places that they have open in their organizations yes that’s correct it by the way the same way I hope I ended up with Azul as being a writer board it’s it’s kind of people interacting with each other and learning about what their skills are and what their interests are and then discovering hey we have this on this position in our organization hey and I know somebody on Foojay who has the skills that we need here and that’s really interesting there was never the a big idea behind it you know we’ve been talking about a job board for a long time but on the one hand I think a lot of most developers probably find jobs through the network or through Linkedin and etc etc but and so maybe we don’t really need a

[12:13] Formal job board but what Fiji is an informal job board because you discover what people can do through through your interactions and then you can fill in the gaps you have in your organization based on that so that’s indeed too I know that when we want to get a job the number one criteria is the person who are willing to give you a job is whether he trusts you or not I mean you we all have technical expertise but trust is the first things that you know that is required to you know hire you someone so if if I know someone and I’m confident about his his work his his skills then I’m pretty much willing to give him the opportunity right compared to someone who has excellent opportunity excellent skill but I don’t know him personally or I never seen his work so that’s it’s self-proof approved that so I think in that regard is definitely a great place you know you can showcase your work you can build in production Network also your friends and your friends will definitely recommend you if there is an opportunity you know in their regular right there are

[13:24] Several people of open value writing also on Foojay are these somewhere evolved in finding new jobs or was they were they already working for open value well I think I heard the first time about Foojay about about two years ago I never understand correctly it has been around since 2020 is that correct so I was actually in the early days I was still active at the Java user group and well we were always looking at the Dodge javiors group how can we maybe organize cool defense do things together with others have nice meetups for our members of the Jack and well we found Foojay to be a really interesting initiative like a global Community where you can easily meet meet other people who are active in the community and also at open value we’re a relatively small company and one of our core values is knowledge sharing so we do a lot of conference talks we have our own blog we do a lot of meetups trainings Etc so also from that angle I thought was really interesting to get in to get involved with Foojay just to meet people like there’s also said you get a feeling about who knows a

[14:41] Lot about certain subjects it’s either easy to reach out to people I shared that with my colleagues and I said well that’s a great opportunity to also share our content maybe on Foojay and I asked are there possibilities well for sure and I think especially my colleague that was in the former podcaster Miro he has written quite a few blog posts already I know that one is coming up also right now or maybe it’s already live yeah and it’s it’s a night if you’re passionate about something if you’re really then it’s really nice of course to do to share that with others who are also interested in that subject and Foojay is just a great place for that so I think that’s the reason why well a few of us are contributing and I think also what’s what’s interesting is that normally when you when there is a site where articles about Java or whatever technology are published it’s it’s not a site run by the people who publish the content themselves and this is what is really quite unique here I mean all these other places are wonderful server-side d-zone and

[15:51] Etc etc that do have a commercial angle they do have advertising and it’s all understandable and great but here there is zero advertising and everything is done by the people who provide the content so we all work on it together and it’s it’s quite a different different setup to the normal places where you would publish content you mentioned Azul was actually the founding father or mother of Foojay but now there is this whole Advisory board with a lot of companies open value is also part of that what is the goal of this Advisory Board well The Advisory Board is there to partly to validate the project to say look we believe in this project simply simply that is a valuable thing and the organizations listed on that on the on that side so Foojay.io board it’s not a random person in that company who has made available a logo and a quote it’s really the organization needs to be behind it an organization doesn’t give a logo and the quote just from one person it’s really an organizational commitment because if you say that we believe in this project and we validate it then you’re also implicitly saying

[17:07] That you want to contribute to it you know you want to you want to maintain and sustain it so you want to be part of the project you want to provide content and it’s also a way to get feedback it’s it’s a way to check if if we are all going in the right direction together and because there’s a whole range of organizations and they’re all well-known organizations in the Java community at payara and Jaya frog and data stacks and data dog and open value and more are joining and Vaden and many and it because of that range you really get a stable combination of organizations that have feelers into each part of the whole Java Community which makes it a very balanced structure to lean on and to depend on is that also why open value is part of The Advisory board right yeah I think here John explained it really well why Foojay is really important the Java fuel is constantly changing and I think it’s a fantastic challenge to keep up with everything and it’s really important that we do that together’s Community not from a certain vendor perspective but from all the

[18:18] Different vendors and people contributing to Jeff together they determine the course of java and you need some kind of forum for that and I think it wasn’t really a global forum where you could have these kinds of discussions where you could have indeed all these articles that are being published but the only reason is to basically share the knowledge spread the word about what’s what’s going on so of course why is a company then supporting that there must also be like a business reason right and I simply believe if open value wants to have a good reputation if they if we want to do projects right at customers it’s really important to keep on top of the latest developments and what better way to keep on top of the latest development by sharing knowledge about what you know because each time that you write an article or that you give a talk or something comparable you kind of challenge yourself to be well really exact in what you tell and that you really understand what you’re trying to explain to others so the fact that you challenge yourself as a company by sharing knowledge and as Foojay is a great

[19:24] Platform for that I would say is the reason okay going back to the Daily content that is published on Foojay there is also a role for a moderators and you are one of these moderators for the content what is actually this role that you are doing we don’t have to do a lot of work because our writer is pretty good at their writing and their content is pretty much you know Top Notch so personally as a model we don’t do a lot of work but what we see basically is we make sure that the content is you know properly formatted the syntax of the code that is properly highlighted and we also you know refer related article in the bottom of the page and the right of the right of the page and also we you know we add like if there is a paragraph It’s too long we probably break a little bit so that it’s easier for leaders to read it also we decide one thing which is what are the content we are going to publish this week Gibson is the one who does that every week and other the reviewers pretty much you know pick those topic and you know see all those things like formatting syntax highlighting and

[20:36] You know we provide a good SEO titles and finally we published that in a in our Twitter channel so these are the rules basically has a reviewer but you know pretty much our writers are you know well equipped with you know with their content and we usually don’t do a lot of work we don’t do a lot of change so it’s yeah mainly the Cosmetic changes and keeping everything in line yeah yeah yeah a quick at a point to make Frank from the very beginning one of the ideas behind Foojay also because we started this at the start of Corona the corona time period where people were not going to conferences and were therefore not able to build up their Network so you know many people who’ve been around for a while have a network that they can rely on and so on and know the people in the Java Community but if you are new in the Java Community how do you build up how do you get people to know that you are there you know you start a blog on your own somewhere but no one knows about your blog you want to go to a conference but no one knows who you are so you need a platform like this

[21:47] You know it’s really useful because then you come and you write your content and people and you put your content in the same place for Java Champions and other people who are very well known put their content so one example of that is Helen Scott from jetbrains now I believe at the time you know two years ago when we started the project and she became quite involved you know I hadn’t really heard of her she was quite new at jet brands in the meantime she’s been with manga she’s back at jet brains she’s now keynote speaker at the unconference at the Manchester jug in a couple of months I mean she’s really used or you know this platform has enabled her to become visible in the community so it’s it’s an opportunity for people to take here is a place where you can come and put your content and have other people critique it and look at it and see what you are doing so that when you put your submissions in for conferences and so on people know who you are and yeah although there are already over 150 contributors anyone is welcome to join Stella boys we will add a little more

[22:52] The better yeah indeed we’ll add a link to the how to submit your next article on Foojay and so Foojay is just a WordPress site so that means that it’s pretty easy to use for everyone to contribute Foojay is a WordPress site but it’s not just a WordPress site it’s a highly extended WordPress site it’s developed by a great team in Ukraine and the company is called yolk let me promote them right here in the middle of the war over there and they’re working on future and extending it so for example if you want to use ascudoc if you want to use markdown which you can’t traditionally in WordPress you know that added on extensions to the Foojay WordPress to enable you to do that there’s all kinds of features that have been added and continually being added you know the big thing right now is forums so one thing we are working to add is forums and again that’s going to be an extension that’s being worked on right now in Ukraine we already mentioned now the block we already managed the almanac the events we have slack we have the Twitter we have this podcast which you should know as you are listening we already had a

[23:58] Conference at Foster we are also recording this podcast on the very few day of it’s at Jacob half an hour from now so it doesn’t make any sense at the time that we release this but coincidentally half an hour from now Foojay day at the Jay country in Chicago we’re starting and there’s a great line of speakers Steve Pool from sonotype there are people from Grado from hazelcast venkat is doing the keynote so we really want to bring the community together around this common neutral platform and provide something of use to everybody which is a great extension of already a massive list of content we have so you mentioned the photo which is coming and then there’s one fascinating thing which is ongoing on slack I seen is the certification program yeah certification it’s really interesting topic I would say in well in the software development space and if you look at the Java traditionally we have Oracle certified associate certified program or certification and I think those were actually well set up certification programs you had books trainings well an exam I think it was also well not

[25:13] Really easy to get become certified in associate and definitely not unprofessional I need to memorize a lot about the Java API in an order which program runs and I think well although that’s well really important as a programmer to understand the flow of a program and to understand the Java API being a good programmer is maybe more than just that and it’s about skills that you embody as a programmer that if you understand how to write a piece of code how to refactor it how to desk code etc etc and this is something that you learn by doing and it was a bit harder to test that you cannot test it with a multiple choice question it’s procedural knowledge and not declarative knowledge if you go back to the school books about types of knowledge that we have and we had a discussion with a couple of people at Foojay basically also with a I think there were quite a lot of java Champions involved at one point in the discussion what would be a good way to actually test the skills of a developer and I think almost everybody agreed that while well the traditional jobsification

[26:33] Offers value it doesn’t really predict if you’re a proficient programmer so it does help you but there’s more to it and especially you should be able to well demonstrate that you have certain skills I came into touch with a Norwegian associate professor at the Oslo University it’s really a fun story in the beginning of his Century the PHD and it was all around recognizing trades that predict if you’re a good programmer and he eventually created a model after its PhD and he kept on doing some time to scientific research and he got a grant and he was able to actually hire some programs from the market to test this model and what did this model do well it tests well the proficiency of developers and a way to actually support that is by the way that he did it he had the model which had certain traits and by letting different developers do the test and compare the results with each other he could actually predict how good somebody is at refactoring and testing Etc so this was a really nice nice platform and eventually became a product and I thought well this idea this concept

[27:57] Behind this product could be really valuable also for the job community so if we can maybe come up with ideas about what you should test in the skill set of a Java developer and we could also translate that to this model that this guy at also University created we could have some we could have something really valuable and of course you do need a platform like Foojay to First create like a consensus about what’s actually what it actually means to be a good developer that’s step one step two is you gotta find like a committee of people who are willing to discuss think about how you could go one step further what aspects should specifically be tested what kind of IDE should you be able to use and also the Practical stuff about the platform How can any to make sure anybody can use it but yeah we formed that committee with it with a few people and we’re actually we’re quite a few steps and we’re now working on first prototype and I think it looks really promising at that point this point and there’s a lot to it I think this will probably solve a lot of discussions and

[29:19] Twitter jokes about the questions being asked in a job interview of what is I always say if I had a job interview I’m not a jit compiler I who will not able to explain what exactly is happening but I have been doing Java development for over 10 years but I think I would fail a lot of theoretical exams you know I always bought there’s a lot of fun doing these multiple choice questions of certification programs but it was mainly that it’s fun right I mean there’s a reason that we use an IDE and not an output as an editor so if you want to pass the current Oracle certification professional program you need to put in probably weeks if not months of study even if you’re an experienced developer and that I think that says it all right and you know you mentioned about job interview and there are a lot of different people have a lot of different opinions about how to do a tech interview some of the experienced developers say I don’t even don’t even want to do a tech interview because I’m an experienced developer well yeah you can have all sorts of opinions about this but then but ideally if it would

[30:29] Really truly succeed with the with this program so the nice thing about the foodj developer program is that it you give a developer certain task programming tasks and it starts well it lasts between 20 40 minutes per task and well the way that you complete the task or compared to a database of other people who complete the tasks and based on how you did the task you’re compared to them you get a relative score of your proficiency so you can in this model replace the tasks what does it mean does it means if you do like a Foojay developer test in the beginning of your career maybe you score like a free on skill from zero to ten but as you grow in your proficiency you can redo the test with different tasks because of the way it’s set up it’s fair to compare the score and later moment you create to the earlier one and you can go from a three to a six without you having any advantage of having the test done before you can even do this during a training course if you teach somebody like Java fundamentals or something similar and you can measure at the beginning and at the end of the training

[31:48] And I think this is something truly unique to this setup because again if you have ever done Java certified professional certification the best way to prepare is basically practice a lot of the exam questions that you can find on the internet because otherwise it will be pretty hard to pass I’m I’m quite sure that a lot of people do that and this is something that won’t work with the setup that we’ve chosen sounds very interesting and fun even trying then to do the exams just for to know your scores in this system are there other IDs I think a lot but what are the plans for the near future well it’s quite a lot of small things that need to be tweaked on the future site and that could be it could be better as I mentioned there’s the forums coming up which will be really great for SEO so that people can find those answers to questions I think that is one thing that is a problem with Slack that you know someone can ask a question on the slack Channel and you get an answer but no one will be able to find it again and that’s what we want to solve by having a forum and so once that is there maybe really a

[33:06] Job board I think a job boat is good because it would result in people coming and you know it would increase the traffic if if Foojay were to be the place where you would go to find jobs in the Java ecosystem and the starting point would be that there would be jump ads there from payara and from data stacks and from hazelcasting from Azul from open value only board members would have their job ads there that’s one area another area that I think is interesting is the calendar so right now there is a calendar on Foojay and you can put your events in there but it could be much more user-friendly and I’m thinking about something more like Google Calendar so imagine if there was like a Google Calendar type events calendar and very clearly visible and very prominent where you could just click on the click on a date on that calendar as in anybody and so without logging in or anything just click on that date and putting your event and it would then be in draft and then we would determine whether or not it’s nonsense or whether we should actually publish that so really make the calendar

[34:19] Be a central place where you would always go to as a place to see what conferences are coming up what are the meetups what are the jugs and that you can do searches and things like that yeah it’s really I didn’t know you were planning on that as well and I just want to say you triggered something some idea so it’s really always a challenge to find out about when which go for papers actually open you constantly need to refresh different pages it would be really awesome to also add like call for papers storm ending dates to that I think also going beyond that you know when you go to a conference if you’ve been to a conference many times you’ve been to a particular City many times and there are coffee Hangouts that you are aware of and there are museums that you visited so imagine if you would get tips from speakers from previous years to the conference you’re going to next week about hey I went here and I went there and this was interesting you know this is all kinds of interesting sharing we can do purely you know beyond the event itself tips and tricks and insights about

[35:24] The place and voting and all kinds of things we could build around that and this is really it takes time it takes time you know our development team is in the middle of a war among other things so you know but these potentials are there I mean anything that we would that we want we can actually Implement to summarize we have a lot of Foojay content Java content we have all the versions We have the release notes we have changes between Java versions We have command line options forum is coming and certification is coming so yeah it’s one one big Community around Java and everything related well actually it’s broader it’s it’s OpenJDK so in principle it’s kotlin as well for example so it’s it’s it’s really beyond that so the website already contains a lot of content Java related and evaluating gvm related but is this something you can add about the community the great thing about Foojay is it’s so easy to reach out to well a lot of important people or basically people in the global Java Community you can ask a question and you’ll probably get an answer really really fast

[36:39] If you try like LinkedIn or Twitter people who don’t know you probably don’t get a response it’s hard to get a response and each time I try to contact somebody on Foojay I always got a response so I think that that’s maybe for me one of the greatest things about about Foojay one very quick thing I think what is quite unique as well about future is that we want to keep things simple it’s really low threshold and we know that people are busy and they have jobs and they work for companies where they want that content as well so at Fiji what we want to do is provide a place that extends what you are doing in your organization so blog posts that you have for your organization are welcome at Foojay as well and you find that as people read about something else completely unrelated to your thing they read about your thing because it’s in this place where everything is together and getting involved is simple there’s a slack Channel WordPress in many ways is horrible but in other ways everyone knows how it works and it’s quite simple to use and in a perfect world you would have a Java

[37:47] Alternative and someone is welcome to create a Java alternative and as soon as it’s at least as good as WordPress will adopt it but you know it’s it’s all low threshold and simple we don’t want to make life difficult so join in and share your content and become well known in the Java Community it’s also really nice that more companies support Foojay it’s a great place to learn from each other and I think if your company is also part of the Foojay Advisory Board it also gives people potentially will work at you a good idea about how you think about community so definitely encourage everybody to join the ranks final thing I would like like to say is if you want to make good friends join Jose is Friends of OpenJDK and everyone will be your friend there’s no better way to end this podcast than with this message thank you very much first of all the guests of this episode and also you for listening keep an eye on Foojay.io for future articles about development and everything related to the Java World thanks for listening give me a food give me a jake give me the friends of OpenJDK