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

Foojay.io, the website for the Friends of OpenJDK, is turning six years old. To celebrate, Frank Delporte headed to JCON in Cologne, Germany, and sat down with twelve members of the Java community to talk about what Foojay means to them, what they learn from each other, and how the community is evolving.

This episode covers a lot of ground. Sharat Chandar reflects on 25 years in the Java community and why the people are what keep the language alive. Markus Westergren and Iryna Dohndorf both focus on a theme that comes up again and again: developer sustainability. Not just green software, but how you stay healthy, grounded, and relevant when AI is changing everything around you. Markus and his wife researched how developers are reacting to AI, from ignoring it completely to transforming everything they do. Iryna talks about building resilience and robustness as skills, not afterthoughts.

René Schwietzke dives deep into JIT compilation and his work on the 1 billion row challenge, writing fast pure Java code without reaching for unsafe methods. Gerrit Grunwald explains the Disco API, the tool behind SDKMAN, Gradle, and more, which tracks every OpenJDK distribution available, including ones you have probably never heard of from Asia. Catherine Edelveis walks through why choosing the right OpenJDK distribution matters and how reducing Docker image sizes improves both security and performance. Jago de Vreede built a JavaFX UI for SDKMAN and talks about what he keeps learning from the community.

Annelore Egger mentors people who think they do not know enough to speak at conferences. Spoiler: they do. Buhake Sindi brings Jakarta EE into the AI agent world with LangChain4J CDI and a talk on agent-to-agent protocols. François Martin just published a fresh Foojay article on flaky tests and shares what writing and mentoring have taught him about open source. Dominika Tasarz-Sochacka, Frank’s new Foojay colleague, shares her vision for growing the community and making it even more welcoming. And Geertjan Wielenga, who started Foojay six years ago, joins remotely from under a lighthouse in Ireland to look back and look forward.

Foojay is more than a blog. It is a Mastodon server, a Slack community, the Disco API, a book on sustainability, a podcast, and now an education catalog. Six years in, it is still growing, still community-driven, and still very much a place where anyone who works with Java is welcome.

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Content

00:00 Introduction

02:16 Sharat Chandar

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharatchander/
Java community and history
What you can learn from conferences and articles

05:37 Markus Westergren

https://www.linkedin.com/in/markuswestergren/
https://foojay.io/sustainability-for-java-developers/
https://foojay.io/today/join-slack-com-t-foojay-signup/
Book “Sustainability for Java Developers”
How to “sustain yourself” in this strange-AI-changing-world
Everyone in the Java community is approachable and wants to help you

09:46 Iryna Dohndorf

https://www.linkedin.com/in/iryna-dohndorf/
https://foojay.io/today/author/iryna-dohndorf/
Mentoring about sustainability as a developer + groundness + robustness skills
High performance without crushing your soul

13:59 René Schwietzke

https://www.linkedin.com/in/reneschwietzke/
https://foojay.io/today/the-curious-case-of-different-runtimes-with-different-training-data-jit/
Diving deep into the runtime, JITWatch
About the broad mix of topics handled on Foojay
Foojay helps connect the Java community with Mastodon
Writing the best performing pure, safe Java code for the 1B row challenge

18:28 Gerrit Grunwald

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerritgrunwald/
https://foojay.io/today/author/gerrit-grunwald/
https://foojay.io/today/disco-api-helping-you-to-find-any-openjdk-distribution/
https://sdkman.io/
The Disco API, the source with all the available OpenJDK distributions, is used by SDKMAN, Gradle, and many other tools
About the many distributions that are available, even ones that are mainly (and only) used in Asia
About bringing opensource projects to Commonhaus to ensure their future

27:45 Catherine Edelveis

https://foojay.io/today/author/catherine-edelveis/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ytdo8OGEYFI
https://foojay.io/today/which-java-runtime-should-you-use-in-production-comparing-openjdk-distributions/
Reducing Docker sizes improves security and performance
Many distributors provide builds of OpenJDK

31:16 Jago de Vreede

https://foojay.io/today/author/jago-de-vreede/
About the Java community and the place of Foojay in it. What is good, what are we missing?
SDKMAN, creating an UI for it, and using the many OpenJDK distributions

35:05 Annelore Egger