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

Transcript

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[0:00] 6 years ago the first post was published on Foojay.io. Today Foojay is where the Java community comes to write, connect, learn, and survive the crazy AI changes. Welcome to the Foojay podcast all your news about OpenJDK. Welcome to another episode of the Foojay podcast. This one is special because Foojay.io, the website for the friends of OpenJDK, turned 6 years old in April. And what better place to celebrate than J Conf in Cologne, where I grabbed a microphone and talked with 12 people who all have one thing in common, they care deeply about the Java community. You might think Foojay is just a blog, but as you’ll hear in this episode, it’s much more than that. We’re talking about the Foojay Mastodon server, the Disco API that powers SDK Man and Gradle, the sustainability for Java developers ebook, the Slack community, the education catalog, the podcast you’re listening to right now, and a lot more.

[1:02] I spoke with Sharath Chandar, who has been in the Java community for 25 years and knows exactly why it keeps growing. With Markus Westergren and Irina Dondorf, who both focus on keeping yourself healthy and grounded as a developer in a world that AI is turning upside down. René Schwietzke goes really deep into Jit compilation and the one billion row challenge. Garret Grynwaldt is the person behind the Disco API. And with Katherine Eder-Weiss, I spoke about the Docker security and OpenJDK distributions. Jaco de Vries works on a JavaFX UI on top of SDK Man. And Anna-Maria Eger mentors people into becoming conference speakers. I also spoke with Boubacar Cindy who brings Jakarta EE into the AI agent world.

[1:52] And François Martin who writes about flaky tests and open source lessons. And there’s also Dominika Tadzoka Sukashka, my new Foojay colleague who has big plans for the community. And last but not least, Geert-Jan Wielinga, the person who started Foojay 6 years ago joining us from somewhere near a lighthouse in Ireland. So, let’s get started. Hi, my name is Sharath Chandar. J Conf, I’m here because it’s one of the greatest conferences that really bring this the Java community together. Mhm. You have a very long history in Java. How do you look at the community, the people who are here? Yeah, yeah, been in the Java community now for 25 years and to see it grow, I think some of the measurements say there’s almost 15 million Java developers around the world. That happens from building relationships around Java. We get to share our ideas, our use cases, our best practices, our way to sort of network with each other to really support each other and you know, the lifeblood of Java is really the people. It’s really great to see. Yeah. That’s also what Foojay tries

[3:03] To do is bring people together in a community and write about Java. Is it important to have tools like that? It’s it’s paramount. You know, having a destination to go to, to find someone, to find ideas, to find concepts, helps keep us evolving our careers and it’s really good to see Foojay investing time and effort because your community also work at companies and so when you make that connection between people and business value, it becomes something that’s long-lasting. Mhm. You’ve seen the language also evolve, not only the community. Do you love the Java that we have now? Java continues to evolve. It’s it’s a it’s a it’s a beautiful journey that we’ve seen and it really comes from the fact that the community steps up, shares what ideas they want to see in terms of where they want to see the language and platform move and knowing that the community has such an important role in shaping the future of Java, I think we’ll keep it relevant for decades.

[4:11] Mhm. What are you looking forward to where Java will go to in the next years? Well, we celebrated the community celebrated 30 years of Java in 2025. I think Java has 30 years and more to go and that really comes from activities like this at J Conf where you get to hear technical talks, but you also get to meet other developers, other people in the community, share your ideas in the hallway track and to have programs like Foojay here to sort of galvanize us to all come together. I just think makes us better in our craft because developers don’t just develop, they’re creators. So, they develop to create something of value and you can see that value wherever you go here at J Conf and around the world.

[4:59] And someone like you with so much experience, do you still learn from an event like this? There’s always something new to learn. You know, the saying goes, there’s something new to learn every day and if we just lift our eyes up just a little bit, you can see just what the is available on the horizon and so I think it’s it’s very important that we focus on people because it’s what you know, it’s people that not only develop the technology, but use the technology and so giving all of us a platform to share, to connect, to collaborate, to communicate is priceless. My name is Markus Westergren. I am here as a speaker. But you’re not only here as a speaker because you’re also a Foojay contributor. You have some articles, you have been in the podcast before and you’ve cooperated on the book. Can you tell us more about that book? Yes, of course.

[5:52] I learned about the book from the Foojay community and the idea was that we would share our input on sustainability for Java developers. I thought it was an awesome opportunity for me to share what I knew, but also to learn from other people in the community. Sustainability is very broad. What’s your look at it? My look is more for the personal view that how can I as a developer sustain myself in this ever-changing world? So, so what can I do to keep myself healthy? What can I do to help others? What is good things to do as a developer to stay sane in this crazy world? It’s really crazy. Your talk is also about that topic? Yes, exactly. I’m doing it with my wife who is an occupational therapist. So, we are focusing on how the change of AI how the AI change is making us feel as developers. How is it affecting our identity as a developer?

[6:55] And can you summarize it for the podcast in a few sentences? Yeah, I can try. We talked to a lot of people and we did some research and people have four different reactions basically you could say for this. Some they are completely just ignoring it, it doesn’t exist. Some say, oh well, maybe I’ll try it a little bit, I’m a bit skeptical. Some are like, oh wow, this is going to help a lot and others is completely transformed like I’m changing everything I do. This is the best thing since sliced bread basically. Mhm. And they also the people who are mostly skeptical are also the ones who feel most scared about the future as a developer. So, so our tip to people is to look into this, try and learn more, how does it really work? And what can I contribute that AI can’t? So, so where do I bring value to my employer?

[7:48] And which type are you? 1 2 3 4? I’m thinking I’m I’m between two three. It’s like in the middle. It’s very Swedish thing maybe. Average. Because when we read the social medias, it’s often either this is the best, it will do anything, it’s magical and other side is it will doom us all to oblivion. I think it’s somewhere in between and it’s going to be what we make of it. Yeah, yeah. So, you’re part of this community, you’re contributing to the book. What did you learn from Foojay articles, from the community, from talks here? I learned that even the people that we see as as these famous ones that are unapproachable, that they are not really. They are actually just people like everybody and we all have something to share. So, so take the chance, go to a conference, talk to people, reach out to a person who have written written an article or anything. They usually want to have your feedback.

[8:47] And they’re also just people. Yeah, really true and we have the Foojay Slack to support that. So, people the authors of Foojay are most of the time also on the Slack. Is this also where you learn from others? Yes, definitely. About the articles they write. Sometimes you even get asked to give feedback on an article that the person have written. So, definitely. So, that is highly recommended to join the Foojay Slack as a start. You’re also a speaker. So, you can probably confirm that the hallway track is maybe more important than giving your talk yourself and only there being on the stage, but then actually learning from others how they what they learn from your talk is more important? Definitely because we can only share what we our experiences. But then by talking to people and they realize, oh but this really relates to me and then they can share their struggles and then I learn more about that. So, that is exactly true. So, so take time, go and talk to people in the hallways. So, or on the Foojay Slack or whatever that you need us.

[9:45] Exactly. Yes, definitely. Yes.

[9:46] My name is Irina Dondorf. What brings me to J Conf? I think my passion for Java community, my contribution and also all the people I meet here. So, I knew a lot of speakers who are contributing, whom I met in different countries of Europe. So, and it is really a pleasure to meet all these people here, to speak to them up, and just to see their happy places. But actually, yesterday I had my very first mentoring hub session. So, I’m a mentor now

[10:21] [laughter]

[10:22] And very happy about this. And it was actually about how to build and gain groundness, so how to build resilience and robustness skills in such in a very sustainable way. so, your soul don’t get crushed. and I think this is a particular important topic for software engineers, especially when AI rising so fast and so high. So, we need to build this resilience, and this is what I’m was talking about my men- mentor mentorees. yeah, and I’m just happy to contribute in the future. Okay, you want to contribute. You already have an profile on the Foojay website, so we’re looking forward to your first article. We are actually working on a book with Foojay about sustainability, and we already have a chapter about yeah, keeping yourself sustainable and healthy. So, that’s actually one of your pet projects.

[11:19] Yeah, yeah, it is yeah, absolutely. So, actually, it is my passion robustness and resilience methods, also performance optimization methods in computer science and in Java ecosystems, especially. So, this is my passion topic I’m talking in conferences about, but I also saw this demand to build this sustainability also for software engineers, and independent if they are juniors or seniors, it is such an important skill. Maybe more important than just any any any technical technical skill you need for your daily work. So, this is also very important, but also mostly underestimated. Yeah. And is it very heavily influenced by AI? yeah, I mean, of course, yes, sure. You know why? Because I I’m very sure that each of us, so and especially in software development, people and managers, juniors, seniors, all of us are experiencing extremely the uncertainty.

[12:37] And what we do, so we are pushing us more harder and more faster against our goals. And in the end, this is a risk. So, for example, burnout or Yeah. anxiety. So, all of these symptoms we already know. this is why we need to be more grounded in these uncertain times. Okay. other stuff you learned here today, this week at this conference? yes, sure. I met really incredible people here, speaker. One colleague of mine, for example, did her very first speaker talk. So, yeah, it was just a pleasure to see her eyes before this event and after she gave a talk. So, this remembers me on myself being in the same situation years ago. yes, and also meet other people to speak to them about uncertainties or maybe vulnerabilities or maybe about what I’m struggling currently about, and I also got some very very helpful advices.

[13:53] Yeah, yeah. How to continue with my talks and blog articles. I’m René. I’m one of the speakers here at JCON, and most active in some Java user groups, which basically brought me here. Mhm. And you’re also a Foojay author with a single article, but a very interesting one. Can you explain a bit what the problem was? First, I apologize for not posting more. it’s just a time thing. the article was about how C2 compiles sometimes very unpredictably and develops basically really really bad assembly. So, it was finding out why. so, we did a lot of benchmarking, and the problem is it’s not every second run is bad. It’s maybe every 15th or something like that. But if it’s bad, it’s really really bad.

[14:36] Basically, [clears throat] it’s runtime overhead of three. So, instead of 10 seconds, it runs 20 or 30. And if you process a million lines, you run into issue, and especially it just crawls and you don’t know why. What I find fascinating about this is a really deep technical problem. So, you really went deep into JitWatch C and how you found out. That’s the nice thing about Foojay. You have these deep technical articles and then release notes and a very broad mix. Isn’t that one of the strengths of Foojay? It is. It is. It is it’s the reason why I check the website frequently. Also, by the way, I like that you have a Mastodon channel. That was just really really helpful and helps to connect to people.

[15:16] So, this is what we really like. So, condense, really knowledgeable articles in one place, all around Java. Mhm. Okay. You’re here at the conference also as a speaker. What’s the talk about? It was, of course, about speed. It’s the Yonom lite node 1 billion row challenge. and this final solution is extremely fast, but also extremely unreadable. It’s not really Java code anymore. you know, bit shifting to convert stuff. So, I came up with the idea of presenting a Java only solution that’s not unsafe, it’s not growl, nothing. But hopefully, it’s not as fast, but fast enough. usually, I start with 20% goal of the original runtime and end up with something like 10. and yesterday, it was the parallel edition because I was doing the single-threaded one before.

[16:02] And so, we arrived at a count 4.something seconds with a pure Java one, which still scales across CPUs. So, if more CPUs, you’re faster, which was really really nice to see how fast you can get with pure Java. And there’s still a little bit room because it’s not finally tuned to what you can really do at the end. These unsafe methods are related to how you can access memory. Is that improved with the FM API? Did you try that out? No, I haven’t tried this out. Basically, I’m trying to not use unsafe at all because it’s kind of a really dangerous territory. and so, all the final solutions basically used unsafe because that’s the way how you read a not one byte, but eight bytes at a time. you can do this with pure Java as well, but due to the checks of the methods you call, it’s huge overhead, so it doesn’t really pay off.

[16:50] Only unsafe is basically the way to do it. Unsafe. And so, I’m trying to, you know, and if people already question my Java code at the end, which is still clean Java, but of course, it’s so optimized that you just need 5 MB. You can turn off the garbage collector at the end for the final solution, which people find, “Oh, that can’t be Java anymore.” But it is. Yeah, messing with the garbage collector. But yeah, it’s part I find that one of those amazing pieces of technology within the Java system that you don’t need to worry about this garbage collection. Definitely, this is one of the beautiful things. This is one of the reason why people now start to do Rust. I think it’s mainly because you get speed, but also safety.

[17:31] So, they go Rust, which of all I was arguing get this with Java. Obviously, there is this little bit of garbage collection, but you can get rid of it if you carefully program at the end of the day. And I know that a lot of trading companies run Java, and they basically garbage less because they write just code differently. so, this is a big community event. What do you still learn from the community as an experienced developer yourself? Well, you need this reflection of that someone else is doing it either the same way or slightly differently. You learn new things because you’re just kind of stuck to your area of expertise. So, you see that people do different things differently. It’s really cool. And of course, you need this reflection at the end of the day that you do it right. There’s another way to do it. you can also teach people how to do it. You can learn from others.

[18:22] And this is the reason why I’m here, and this is why I’m really loving the Java community because it’s all kind of about exchange at the end. My name is Gerrit Grunwald. I’m your colleague.

[18:30] [laughter]

[18:31] I’m a speaker here at the conference, and yeah, I love it. JCON, super cool. Okay. And I definitely wanted to have have this interview because you are the driving force of the Disco API, and not many people know it exists or what it does, but it’s actually used everywhere. Correct? I hope so. Well, I also I’m a little bit afraid of that, but it’s yeah, we started that when we started with Foojay. I think it’s Is it 6 years ago? Yeah, 6 years ago, man. And our CTO, Gil, had the idea that we need an API that provides links to all the available distributions, right? That was the idea. And so, there was the pandemic. I had time, so I started doing that thing. And in the meantime, I figured out, “Oh, it’s used by SDKMAN, by Gradle, I heard IntelliJ.” I’m not sure.

[19:22] And other tools. So, yeah, it’s used It’s used quite a lot. Yeah. So, it’s an API that I can say I want the Zulu distribution 17, the latest one. Something like that. Yeah. For example, you can choose the distribution. You can choose a lot of stuff. So, it’s maybe too much, but in principle, you can choose the distribution, the architecture of the CPU, and the operating system, bitness, version, and so on. Yeah, it’s it’s a lot of stuff you can do with it. Where did you find all this information? that that’s the that’s the part that is the most annoying because you really have to scrape the web. And it’s you think, “Oh, it should be easy.” But it’s not because every distribution has its own way of sometimes naming files. It’s sometimes have to parse it from the file name.

[20:17] Sometimes there is an API. So, sometimes there’s just the website. I have to really parse the website, the HTML code, and figure out where it comes from. And things change, right? This is the biggest problem because I can’t check all these things all the time. So, it’s mainly users that tell me, “Oh, the link is not there anymore.” Oh, and all this version doesn’t appear. So, I have to check what they change and for example, stuff that happened was IBM changed the repository on GitHub, the name, where they host the version. So, I didn’t know that. And then sometimes people ping me and said, “Where’s the latest version of Samurai?” I said, “It should be there.” And then I figured, “Oh, they changed the GitHub name.”

[20:58] Stuff like that. It’s it’s and I just do that on the side. So, it’s and I’m the only one, which is one of the problems, yeah, because it’s we host it in Azure, right? It’s hosted in Azure AWS, part of AWS. And so, I can’t make it publicly available because of that. But the sources are publicly available the old source, yeah. So, not I didn’t update anymore because the problem is because we deploy it in AWS in the Azure pipelines, I have to use GitLab that we use inside of Azure. Plus additional things to make it possible to deploy it on the cluster and all that. And I can’t simply make that publicly available, which is the reason in the beginning I had everything mirrored on GitHub. But that’s so much work that I decided to I skip that. I use Git Hub really only for the issues.

[21:52] And then I fix it in the production stuff in our code. I know it’s not not ideal, but this is the only way I can really maintain it at the moment. There are things going on with SDKMAN. Nothing official yet, but I hope we can make Disco part of SDKMAN. This is the long-term plan that I have. because if I would leave Azure, the project would be dead. That’s an issue with a lot of these open source projects, mainly driven by one person. And then you need the community to keep it alive and improve it.

[22:31] Yeah, and I wasn’t aware that it’s used by so many because people don’t tell me. I just saw when RingGradle suddenly used it, I saw an increase in downloads, which was I don’t know how many percent, but it bumped to millions of downloads a month. And I wasn’t aware. And I wasn’t prepared because we just put it on deployed it on maybe one node, and yeah, a small one. It was running. But then with this amount of hits, you need to adjust, right? So, and that’s the problem with these kind of things because you and I don’t really monitor everything of that because we never knew will it be accepted, will it be used? And then some people abuse it completely. They download all the packages and keep their own cache. And that for the API, this is because it’s around 140,000 links.

[23:20] And if you just get all of them, then it just takes some time because it’s just a huge JSON file. I didn’t do paging and all that because that was not the intention, right? So, intention was pick one package, maybe two, but not 140,000, right? So, but people I’m being creative. Why? Well, it’s I guess it’s what I see is that at specifically on Mondays, this week is release week. We have a new release on last Tuesday, and I see specifically this week that we have an uptick in downloads. And it looks like that bigger companies, I can just guess, they just download everything and keep their own cache. This is what they do probably. And then they serve it from their own cache, which I understand it, but for us it’s just this is terrible. And I will avoid that in the future. So, the next version won’t it won’t be possible to download all the packages anymore because this is just an overkill. Yeah. Yeah, it’s ridiculous how many distributions there are. It’s it’s a lot. On the other side, isn’t that one of the strengths of Java that you can pick the distribution which fits your use case, license, how you want to pay

[24:31] Or not for it? Absolutely agree. So, it’s you find for example, and this is a little bit different from we are used to the Western world. But if you specifically look to the Eastern world in Asia, they have at least four distributions that are quite big in Asia that nobody knows here. And they have some nice features, right? So, there’s for example, Tencent Kona. They have ports of the JDK 8 and 11 that runs on arm where they have something like ZGC, which is not available in OpenJDK in 8 and 11, but they have because they ported it. And then there’s another one where they have something like Loom. They call it fibers. And this also works. I think it’s I’m not sure if it’s I’m not sure about the distribution, but doesn’t matter. But there’s one in Asia which is comparable in performance. They claim it’s even faster than Loom, so virtual threads and all that. But it works on JDK 11. So, there are some interesting projects in this as you said.

[25:31] Choose the right distribution for your problem. Sometimes you can choose just something like Temurin which works for everything or Azul Zulu. But sometimes you need something like, let’s say, Crak, and then you have to choose a specific one, right? So, this is it’s good that we have this diversity and all these different distributions, but it makes my life harder sometimes.

[25:52] [laughter]

[25:52] Well, you mentioned SDKMAN. I use it a lot to switch between versions. Switching it’s mainly for Mac and Linux. I think you can also use it on Windows. It would be great if this gets somehow merged with Foojay Disco API. So, that would really be a good idea, I think. Yeah, so the problem with SDKMAN, what they have is they struggled the same way, right? So, they had to manually find all the distributions and add the links and stuff. When I came up with Disco API, they had been like, “Ah, thank god there’s there’s an API. I can just ask that.” So, they started using that, but it led to some problems. So, we what we are working on right now is that SDKMAN will come up with something like a specific API, and I will push packages to SDKMAN instead of they pulling us.

[26:41] And so, we when we talked about that, we thought, “Maybe we can just use the because the Disco API is not really only the API. It’s it’s two services. There’s an updater service that runs all the time and on a schedule, and then it checks the different links for downloads. And then there’s the API itself that just provides the links, right? So, and the updating part, this could be part of SDKMAN because this is then just running and updating the links for SDKMAN internally, which would make things easier. And because SDKMAN is as your own project, too, like Pi4J, right? It’s part of the Common House Foundation, it would have a new home. So, I could make sure that someone can take over in the future because Mark from SDKMAN has the same problem. He’s working on SDKMAN. If he will die, then SDKMAN, problem, right? So, that’s why he moved it to Common House.

[27:36] And so, we are in some conversations nearly every day where we talked about this stuff and how to combine it to make it more available to others, yeah. Yeah. My name is Katherine Edelweiss. I’m developer advocate at BellSoft, and at J Fall I’m speaker. And I also meet lots of people here. Okay. And you speak about? I speak about hardening container images and how to secure a Docker container image in just under 45 minutes. Okay. We have a whole chapter in our book the Foojay book Sustainability for Java developers about reducing Docker sizes. That’s something you also do in the talk? Well, as well. because reduction of the Docker container image leads more to the security, more to than performance improvements, right? Because you might have a better memory footprint, that’s okay, but for security it’s more important because you have less packages and less dependencies. But you also published an article on Foojay recently about all the many Java distributions and a nice video about that. what is the main takeaway of that? Apart from Oracle Java, there are several OpenJDK

[28:47] Distributions, right? essentially, they are the same. They all based on the same OpenJDK code base. So, basically, if you are just developing the Java application, you can take any of them, right? But then if you are the enterprise developer, then you might want to choose the vendor who provides the OpenJDK distribution that fits your production needs. Mhm. Okay. you work at BellSoft, one of those providers. I work at Azul, one of those providers. But both we are sharing our content on Foojay. So, we really want this platform to be for the community. Yes, exactly. And basically, BellSoft’s and Azul’s OpenJDKs are the most Java focused ones on the list because the others Red Hat OpenJDK, Microsoft builds of OpenJDK, and so on, SAP machine, right?

[29:41] They are more tailored to the infrastructure that is already provided by these vendors, right? So, if you are, for example, standardized on rail, then you might want to choose the Red Hat OpenJDK, right? In the case of Azul and BellSoft, again, we are Java focused, right? So, that’s more neutral. You can take that the distribution, the standard distribution, or with additional features, additional tools that you need for Java development. Okay. Thanks for sharing that whole overview on Foojay. So, I’ll put the link to the post in the show notes. What do you learn from the community here? Oh, the community is absolutely amazing. This is my first J Conf, and actually it has such a great atmosphere, almost like a family like. I have met so many people here.

[30:27] Some of them I have chatted with online for a long time, so this is the first offline encounter, just like with you, by the way.

[30:35] [laughter]

[30:35] Yes. And I’ve met many new friends. So, yeah, that was an amazing experience. I wish next year I’m here again at J Conf. What are you looking forward to with Java? Like it’s evolving. What can we expect in the next versions? Java is getting more performant, on the one hand, on the other hand, it’s getting more adapted to the AI usage, right? So, Java is still getting the traction, right? It’s still out there and it’s still one of the most popular languages and I think with the next versions, with the next features that are introduced, it’s just going to prove that it’s a very versatile language, programming language for any use case. My name is Gerardo Frias and I’m here to talk about what we have learned with Quarkus in the past three years of moving to production and of course to visit the conference itself, just enjoy sessions and well, enjoy the hallway track. Mhm. You’re also a Foojay author? I’m also a Foojay author. I did a couple of articles there.

[31:34] I’m also a Java Pro author. Java Pro is well, kind of big here in J Conf. But yeah, but I do like to give back to the community and well, educate other people and try to inspire people to do more with Java whenever they can. One of those articles you published is also about SDKMAN and how you built the UI on top of that. What’s the project like? Well, this is indeed a project that is dear to my heart because well, SDKMAN is a fantastic project, but it uses the command line and well, when you’re searching for a specific version of Java to check if it’s installed or where are the updates or whatever, it’s really annoying to use bash scripting to get the stuff out of it. So, I built a UI in JavaFX and I tried to port that to every operating system, so Windows, because at that point we were still running on the Windows as development environment. But also for the Mac and for Linux as well.

[32:27] So, that was fun to build a native application, well, running on multiple operating systems. So, that’s a quite a hard thing to do, but eventually it worked out and I put an article on Foojay. Which is very nice because SDKMAN actually uses the Foojay Disco API to get all these versions and the history about it. We just talked about it with Gerrit Grunwald. How do you look at all these versions? What do you use on your machine? Locally, with my personal laptop, I have a lot of SDKs installed, a lot of GraalVM and then well, all kind of things to figure out and to play around with it. But on my work laptop, I have only a couple of versions of Java installed, the latest LTS version I’ll try to keep that one up to date, but that’s about The work you do, which version of Java is it using? We’re using Java 25.

[33:20] They said, “Okay, let’s stick to the LTS.” Although I don’t think they actually pay for support, but hey, it’s it’s an easy number. But we are allowed to move to 26 if there’s a feature in 26 that we really, really want or a performance increase is really noticeable. Then we are allowed to move to 26, so it’s quite nice. What do you look How do you look at all these versions of Java? Are you using the latest features? Are they helping you to write better code? In some versions of Java, there are some cool stuff like the getters. I really like that one. There were some bits of code that I’m not really proud of that were built with streams and now we can able to rewrite them with getters and well, a piece of code of 50, 60 lines code back to less than 10, so that’s quite nice.

[34:10] Cleaner code, we always like that. Cleaner code, less code, but more concise and more readable. So, those kind of features, yeah, they help us quite a lot. We are here at the conference, a lot of people from the Java community are here. What do you learn from community members? Well, I did learn some stuff with for example, the talk about the risk of curl bashing by Steve Poole. Well, I did really check out the scripts that are running, but he told me, “Okay, if you download the script with curl, then the headers change and then they can inject malicious code that way.” So, if you look at it in the browser, the script looks just fine, but when you download it with curl, it can contain malicious code. So, kind of that was an eye opener for me. So, that is that’s that’s nice to eventually learn something today.

[34:59] And Steve Poole also publishes articles about this on Foojay, so we have a full circle here. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. My name is Annelore Ecker and I am here mostly because I really like the conference and therefore I said I would be a volunteer volunteer again. And yeah, then I’m also a mentor, but this was just like a side thing. Like if I’m already here, I can also give a mentoring. So, you’re contributing back to the community, helping people Do Are you a mentor yourself and what’s the topic? So, yeah, I also did gave a mentoring and my mentoring was called I don’t know enough to speak at conferences. So, my mentoring was about how to get into becoming a speaker, especially when you maybe are unsure.

[35:49] I think a lot of people think that they don’t know enough to be able to contribute to the community. So, I think by enabling more people to contribute to the community, I indirectly Yeah. Even have more contribution. It’s it’s a two-way. You help people reach out and you come better speaker yourself, I guess. Yes, I think so, because then I also have to reflect more about how I approach things and it’s I mean in general, if you teach others, you also learn more. We I think we know that. And sometimes when I did mentorings, if there were some speakers around, they sometimes also joined and also gave their insight on how they do their talks. So, also like this, I learn from other speakers what they just say.

[36:44] I interviewed you already a few times in the past conferences in the last year. So, you are a regular guest in the podcast. How did this affect what you do in your job and then how people look at you? After my first interview, it was [snorts] funny because someone that was a lecturer at my conference did a comment and she really thought, “Oh, she has heard of you.” And I was a student of her and she thought, “Oh, it’s so cool that now I’m in this podcast.” So. It’s really nice that the community is involved in different ways like conference of today. What are you learning yourself from this conference? I think I also just learn how important it is to connect because always in like small conversations, you I mean, you realize how many struggles you maybe have, others also have because often we don’t talk about them, but in the most cases, we also have them.

[37:46] And also because there are just so many people from different companies, different backgrounds, you get like much more different insights than if you would only talk to your colleagues and so on. My name is Buhake Sindi. I’m from South Africa, Johannesburg and I had a talk on Tuesday. So, that what brought me to J Conf. And the talk was about? Agent to agent protocol for Jakarta EE developers. So, the main idea was as Jakarta EE developers, we like to annotate stuff and inject. So, we thought, “Okay, since we now in a period of AI and agentic, why don’t we just add, you know, expose your agent to for other developers who has also AI agent to communicate seamlessly and we as Java developers, we thought, “Okay, cool.

[38:46] Let’s create a Let’s create a plugin to actually take your protocol and your existing enterprise AI agent and connect them together.” To communicate. And then it exposes it If you’re familiar familiar with microservices, then it exposes it exactly the same way with the defined protocol and that’s it. As a developer and here in the community, you hear a lot of Yeah, what should we do with this AI thing? How will it influence our job? What’s your take on this? My take on AI would be as as a developer, use it because I also use AI to enhance my development skills, but not completely to replace us because I believe develop for developers, one, coding is an art, and also the developers like to architect stuff. They like to go to the ground and to the real dirt and start from the ground up. Yes, AI can do that, but AI does not go to the concept of you know, scaling to with when business need to scale the application because of a Oh, now suddenly they have Facebook amount of users, you know, how to sink into that lower level. And every developer is different, you know, they have different

[40:16] Way of thinking, they have different way of architecting stuff. You know, it’s but AI can help you to think differently, but ultimately, you know, developers will always be needed to build enterprise applications. And to maintain the foundation of a project.

[40:35] Yes, and also I believe that tokens will be Tokens are relatively expensive, so businesses might consider to cut costs and give some jobs to back to developers and some jobs to AI agents. So, there will be a balance, so in the future years, we might not need all the developers, but developers will still be needed. Yes. Yeah, that’s something those tokens cost money, but actually those companies are not earning from them now yet because they’re still building some. So, tokens will probably become more expensive even. Yeah, and because also we do not have the resources to run these infrastructures. For example, the power grid, AI needs needs a lot of power. So, it will cost more to expand the power grid, and which goes back to the data centers to fund those things, so that means that it will go into the price of tokens, and you know, so there’s a ripple effect. So, this kind of things it will cost money in the initial run.

[41:41] I think if once the world jumps into it, then there will be people who will start discounting, but at the end of the day, you will still need developers because nobody wants to throw a lot of money off tokens. Yeah. Sustainability is a big topic. We are even working on a book with the Foojay community about the sustainability. So, Foojay wants to focus on the Java community. You do the same thing with your talk at the conference like this. Yeah. What is something that you learned from the community or want to give back to it? The community is actually all integrated. So, you know, everybody has an impostor syndrome. You like, “Oh, I see Adam Bien or you know, Philip or whoever, you know, the what we consider the legend, and then they like, “No, we like you as well.”

[42:35] And you know, so Yeah, that’s that’s a nice part because now you can collaborate with them and, you know, and filling the gaps where it where it’s missing. Or the nice thing as well is contribution to open source project. For example, I’m a contributor to LangChain for J. Recently, we’ve introduced like LangChain for J CDI where you can inject your LangChain for J AI agent using the Jakarta EE way, so at inject and Bob’s your uncle because we do all the pluggable work in between, and we see now it’s getting traction because Emily and IBM introduced it yes talked about it yesterday, and my other colleagues are going to talk about it in Devoxx France. Then I’ve seen it in some Jakarta talks as well.

[43:27] So, Eva also talked about it, and so there’s a now a bigger community on how to integrate AI into the enterprise application space, you know. Spring does their way, the Jakarta EE wants to do also their way, so and there’s collaboration with like the Quarkus and so that whole open community, that’s what that’s what brings things like J Kon and Java ecosystem, you know, work perfectly, and it’s it’s lovely. It’s it’s it’s good to learn, and it’s good to come here and integrate and, you know, see what’s going on. My name is Marta, and I am a J Kon on one hand because I’m a volunteer, but also just because I love the conference, and yeah, and I have [clears throat] three mentorings as well that I’m giving. So, Okay, mentoring, so you’re giving back to the community. What is the idea of the mentoring sessions? So, these are sessions where you are in groups of, let’s say, four to six people, maybe, and you get advice from a mentor that is an expert in a topic. And they’re really great topics. I mean, there’s been, for example, you know, the guy behind Job Runner, who’s also an open source tool or

[44:35] Framework, whatever you want to call it. you know, who is talking about how to monetize open source. So, if you have an open source project, for example, and you’re interested in monetizing it, you know, you can visit his mentoring. And it’s not like a talk, it’s like you’re attending it, and then you’re talking to him personally with other people and sharing your, you know, your problems, and then he, you know, the mentors give you targeted advice for your specific problem. So, it’s a very interactive thing. you’re also here because you’re a Foojay author. Actually, we just hit the publish button of a new article of you. thanks for that. why do you want to write on Foojay? Why do you want to share your content?

[45:17] Yeah, so you know, I think it’s a great opportunity because Foojay is a blog that many people read in the Java space, or, you know, if they don’t, they should definitely start reading it. And I think it’s just they have so many great articles, and it’s a great way to reach even more people. I mean, you know, with a talk, you can only reach so many people, or with a mentoring, you know, you have in a talk you have maybe 100 people. If a mentoring you have maybe six people, but a blog post maybe gets read, I don’t know, 100,000 times. This could reach even more people this way. And I feel like it’s also nice because, for example, code examples are easier to copy from than from slides, and so on.

[45:53] And it allows you also to go a bit more in-depth into a topic because in a talk you can only cover so much in 45 minutes. So, and also some people learn better by reading in compare comparison to just hearing it. So, you know, I also have a bit of an academic background, so I also like that people you know, depending on their learning style, they can choose whatever fits them best. Is it important for a developer to actually write about your topic? Do you learn yourself by writing? Definitely. I would say what is more important is sharing something you do or things that you learn, for example, that were really frustrating, you know, you spent, I don’t know, a week to fix this nasty problem that you couldn’t find anywhere online. Nowadays, even AI may be not be able to help you or something. And if you have something like that is kind of gold, you know, make sure to share that in some way, be it, you know, for a blog post or a talk or whatever.

[46:49] But yes, I feel like it is really important because it helps out other people, and, you know, it’s kind of the community spirit, right? We like to share things so others can profit from it because you probably, when you grew up, you also had some, or grew up when you started learning to develop, you probably also had you know, the case where you read something, and that really helped you out to solve a problem. And I feel like it’s a really good way of you know, just paying that forward to the next person because if we don’t do that, then, you know, we will not have in the future the possibility to do this anymore. Okay. Do you remember a few of the Foojay blog posts where you learned from? Yes, I mean, I would say definitely when I prepared my flaky test talk, for example, I looked at the Trisha Gee’s flaky test blog post. It’s pretty old now, but of course, you know, just like many other topics, they even if they are 5 years old or whatever, you know, they are still pretty up-to-date.

[47:46] And this is like the recent most recent one I remember. Apart from that, I remember like especially when I was starting to develop, I like one my only sources were basically YouTube because Foojay, as you know, exists for 6 years, so like since I’ve been developing for quite a while, you know, it didn’t exist back then, unfortunately. I think I would have loved if it existed, but you know, from time to time I do look up things, or I Google something, and then suddenly, you know, a Foojay article pops up, and I’m like, “Oh, great.” You know, and then I’m just looking up what the things are, and it’s really useful for that. My name is Dominika Staszuk-Gałązka, and I work for Azul. I’m a developer advocate, and I mostly work with Payara, Jakarta EE, and Foojay.

[48:27] So, what brings me here to J Kon? Well, the community, the Java community, and I’ve got a talk later today. Okay, and you will help me to push Foojay forward in the future as my new colleague, so thanks for joining here. what’s the plan? I’m very excited about it, so I see the future of Foojay as very bright, so it is all in the hands of community. So, I think I would like to really Well, first of all, thank everyone who is already involved with Foojay. I just checked this morning, and we have about 500 authors registered, which is amazing, around the same amount of people on Slack, so it’s very active community, and it’s been growing over the last couple of months, and all I see it’s is really It’s going to grow more and more. So, I want to invite anyone who works with Java, anyone who is a friend of OpenJDK or wants to become a friend of OpenJDK to check out what we’re doing on Foojay.

[49:22] There’s so much great content to learn from. So, we’ve got people that are sharing their knowledge, sharing their expertise. There’s so many demos, so many articles that you can learn from. So many news as well, so you can actually learn about what’s what’s new in the industry directly from Foojay. We’re very active on Slack as well. So if you join the community on the website, please join us on Slack as well. Me and you Frank, we are there to help. So if anyone is not sure how to start, where to start, how to post or maybe needs some help with editing, posting, whatever you need we’re there to help you. So please join us on Slack, please join us on Foojay. And we also have some sponsors. So if your organization actually has some budget to do help us support OpenJDK Friends of OpenJDK then please let us know cuz that will only help us grow the community.

[50:14] About the community, there’s a lot of them here too. You’re in this community already for a long time. What do you still learn from them? Oh, I learn all the time honestly and I just find that I still don’t know so many things. And what I learned the most really is how much this human connection is needed. So we’ve been through pandemic, we’ve been through all sorts of different ways how people were working. A lot of us are stuck at home most of the day anyway or in the offices but that’s less likely these days. So I’ve learned over and over again at those events including J Fall is that community wants to get together. We want to see each other face-to-face. We want to interact, we want to talk to each other. We want to see others on the stage teaching, we want to learn from them. So I am constantly amazed how this is still the case and how the community keeps it going and all of those amazing people that are running the community that are organizing these events.

[51:10] Yeah, this is there’s so many people to learn from both on the culture and sort of social side and obviously all the technical skills as well. So you heard a lot of voices about Foojay and the community and the Java community all from the J Fall conference. There’s one one person was missing at the conference and that’s Hiertjan who was not there. But I now have him on camera somewhere in the sea. Where are you Hiertjan? Behind me you see the Irish Sea and I’m sitting right underneath Poolbeg Lighthouse which is at the end of a really long walk from Dublin among the South Wall which is a few kilometers long. It’s it’s the longest sea wall in the world at some point especially in the 18th century.

[51:59] And it’s really nice walk and you can see the city of Dublin stretched out over there. And for the rest there’s the Irish Sea. So I’m in a beautiful part of the world. Is this what Java community work leads you to? I think so. I think this is the South Wall Java User Group or the Poolbeg Lighthouse Java User Group. I mean, you know, Java User Groups are wherever you want them to be and you need one or two people even one person and you have a community. So Yeah, that’s also how you started Foojay as a one-person thing out of Azul when you were hired to start Foojay. How do you look back at these 6 years? I think it’s been a great organic success. It’s gradually grown and snowballed and continues to grow and there is continual interest and more people are joining in and sharing their knowledge in a vendor neutral site really community driven.

[53:04] It’s quite a really strong community vibe. And you’ve been doing fantastic with the podcast and also I’m managing the site and so on. So I think it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s growing beyond what one might have expected at the start and I think there is so much scope for so much more to be done. So it’s it’s it’s really a great project. And it’s actually how I got in contact with you because you were looking for authors really at the beginning of the Foojay website. It’s how I started doing more technical writing, published a book and ended up working for Azul myself. So that’s only personal story what Foojay has effect had what effect was for Foojay for me. Do you have similar stories like that?

[53:51] I think many people have similar stories. I was talking to Johannes Bechberger recently at DevNexus. No, not at DevNexus at Devoxx Voxxed Days Amsterdam. And he said it was really great for him as a starting point into his journey and in providing him an initial platform. And now he’s moved on and he’s he’s a little bit less involved than he used to be but people come and go and people benefit from it and then move on do other things and come back again and it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s a friendly watering hole and you know, you can contribute to it and participate in it and when you’ve you know, you move on and do other things again and then you come back again. It’s just I’m hoping it’ll be a place that is always there in one form or another. A virtual an ongoing virtual community but where you see the people in real life when you’re at community conferences like J Fall like Voxxed Days like DevNexus and like your local Java User Group and so on.

[54:51] What are you looking forward to? What can Foojay still bring? Should we start new initiatives or keep it as go as it is going? What whatever people want to do together, you know, we have a platform for it and we have you know, we have a GitHub and you know, we have the WordPress and we have the Slack and you know, we have the Mastodon and we’re working on the book and you know, it and it isn’t even about the end result. It’s about the process. It’s a process of putting a book together. It’s a process of you know, working on articles together. It’s the process is way more valuable than whatever the end result of a particular activity is. Like the education website that we recently started.

[55:32] Yeah. It’s just something wild LD can we collect Java content related to education. Yeah, it’s it’s indeed on the GitHub of Foojay and it became a website a very small website but yeah, it’s it lives within the Foojay project and that’s where we want to have these Java related OpenJDK related and tooling related content of all kinds.

[55:56] Yeah, I mean you know, that could be one direction it could be to go to universities. That’s always been what I’ve been trying to do from the time I was in Sun Microsystems and working on NetBeans is connecting university students and college students using Java in one way or another together and you know, this could be one way. You know, we could go into the different places you know, identify lecturers etc. etc. and say hey, you know, bring your students or there’s always a couple of students who are interested and have them publish their initial articles and you know, get into contact with the whole community and you know, onboard into companies and there’s just so many I mean and it actually worked for me recently the other way around that I had been mentoring students about 10 years ago at a college in the south of the Netherlands and then recently I was looking around for different things to do in different projects to pick up and it turns out that they have been working at this company called DashO which does open telemetry and observability and so on.

[56:56] And these students who I had been mentoring for free and in my own time years ago now in this other project were looking for somebody to do some some documentation and content related work and now part of this work that I’m doing is with them. So it you know, what comes around you know, it what turns around comes around or you know, pay it forward and you know, if you’ve benefited from something in the community then help others and it’s it’s it’s that kind of philosophy I think that underpins what community work is all about. And our Foojay Slack is definitely one one way to do that. People join the Foojay Slack, they can find the authors of the articles which were published on the website but they can also get in touch about other questions they have maybe even the creator of a library where they have a question about and all these people just like on a conference are very reachable. They’re really there to help you. It’s not it’s not a one-way thing.

[57:50] Okay, Hiertjan have fun. You’re enjoying the sun I see.

[57:56] [laughter]

[57:56] Absolutely. And people who want to reach out to you, you’re also still on the Foojay Slack of course and we can reach out to you.

[58:03] Me you can find me under this lighthouse in Dublin.

[58:07] [laughter]

[58:09] Okay, [gasps] have fun and thank you for joining this very quick call. Thank you so much. And that’s a wrap for this episode of the Foojay podcast. A huge thank you to all my guests who shared their time and thoughts at J Fall. Whether it was about squeezing every last nanosecond out of pure Java, surviving the uncertainty that AI brings or simply showing up as a volunteer and mentor at the conference because you believe in giving back. Every single conversation showed what makes this community worth being part of. 6 years of Foojay is also 6 years of articles, podcasts, a Mastodon server, a Slack, a book, the Disco API and now also an education catalog. None of that exists without the people who show up, write, record, review, help and keep coming back. If this episode made you want to be part of that, go to Foojay.io, join the Slack and say hello. We’re there to help you get started. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the Foojay podcast on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. You can find all our episodes, show notes and links to everything mentioned today on Foojay.io. And follow Friends of OpenJDK

[59:22] On social media for the latest from the Java world. Until next time, keep coding, keep connecting and remember the people you think are unapproachable rockstars, they’re just people and go talk to them. Thanks for listening. Give me a food, give me a J, give me the friends of OpenJDK.