DubJUG 255 - The Duke Turns 30

We're joining Azul Systems virtual Java conference, the Duke Turns 30, a celebration of 30 years of Java.

It won't be as much craic as joining your fellow Java developers in Dublin city centre, but If you'd prefer to watch from home, you can register here.

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17:00: 30 Years of Java

Simon Ritter / Deputy CTO / Azul Systems

May 23rd, 1995, saw the launch of not just a new programming language but an entire development and deployment platform. Initially targeted at the brand-new world of browsers and the World Wide Web, it quickly became the de facto standard for internet-scale enterprise applications. Remarkably, thirty years later, it is still always in the top three most popular languages in use by developers. To open our celebration, we'll take a trip back in time to see how Java came about, how it flourished and how it's changed over three decades. We may even have a special guest with some key insights. (more)

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17:30: AI for Busy Java Developers

Frank Greco / Senior Technology Consultant

Yep, we know you're knee-deep in production Java deployments and don’t exactly have time to learn about AI. But your manager is talking more about AI every day, and you’re reading unsettling posts about how GenAI will take your job. In this session, we’ll fast-track you through AI and Machine Learning—tailored just for Java developers who need to get the job done without the need to drill down into data science and complicated math. We’ll cover all the basics and explain how AI can be used in the software development process beyond simple code generation. You’ll walk away understanding where AI fits (and doesn’t fit), understand the ethical concerns, and how you can make yourself more productive and enhance your career direction. - Why AI Matters to Developers and Your Career - Importance of Patterns - Predictive AI (PredAI) vs Generative AI (GenAI) - GenAI vs. Traditional Search Engines - Prompt Techniques - The Importance of Context for GenAI - Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Systems - Fine-tuning vs RAG - Java Libraries for AI/ML - AI and the Software Development Process - Responsible AI and Ethics

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18:00: Behind-the-Scenes Innovations in Java

Dr Venkat Subramaniam / Founder / Agile Developer

It's fascinating to watch the evolution of Java—new features emerging every six months, a language that is getting concise, expressive, and elegant with each release, more power packed for performance and scale at the same time, the praises can be endless, as it should be. However, significant innovation in Java is behind the scenes, things that a casual programmer may not take note of but contributes to significant performance boost or prevents some types of errors. A number of features we see in Java exist in other languages, both on the JVM and outside. However, Java's implementation of the features are either unique or simply different for a good measure. In this presentation we will look at the evolution of Java over the past decade, but from the point of view of behind-the-scenes techniques that support and enforce robustness and performance.

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18:30: We Hate Code - The Joy of Maintaining Dead and Unused Code

Gerrit Grunwald / Principal Engineer / Azul Systems

Do you love to maintain code that you didn’t wrote? Probably not… As systems grow and evolve, the codebase inevitably accumulates clutter, including unused or “dead” code. Often the developers who wrote that code are not even in the company anymore. So how do you know if the code is still used? Dead code can be confusing and it can be the source for vulnerabilities in your code base. So it is not only “legacy” code we have to deal with but also “dead” code and even so called “zombie” code. This session will give you an overview over the common struggle with this types of code and it will try to give you an idea about the differences between those types of code and about tools that will help you to get rid of it.

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19:00: Friends of OpenJDK

Marit Van Dijk / Developer Advocate / JetBrains

Simon Martinelli / Founder & CEO / Martinelli

Ondro Mihalyi / Director and Jakarta EE Expert / OmniFish

Geertjan Wielenga / Community Lead / Friends of OpenJDK

Hear from active collaborators in the OpenJDK community about how they got started and what excites them about using the OpenJDK. Pick up tips and tricks for getting the most out of the OpenJDK and its vibrant international community.

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19:30: Reading Code

Marit Van Dijk / Developer Advocate / JetBrains

As developers, we spend a lot of time learning to write code, while spending little to no time learning to read code. Meanwhile, we often spend more time reading code than actually writing it. Shouldn’t we be spending at least the same amount of time and effort improving this skill? Deliberate practice can help us get better at reading code. In this talk we will discuss the benefits of deliberately practicing reading code in a code reading club or session without an IDE, as well as common strategies to navigate a new codebase and familiarise ourselves with the code using the IDE.

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20:00: OpenJDK Ecosystem

Carmen Delgado / Community Manager / Eclipse Adoptium

Richard Fichtner / Principal Software Architect / XDEV Software Gmbh

Simon Ritter / Deputy CTO / Azul Systems

Tobi Ajila / Java Runtime Developer / IBM

Join us for an insightful panel discussion with industry experts and developers to explore the latest trends, challenges, and innovations in the world of OpenJDK. We’ll discuss upcoming Java features, best practices for optimizing performance, and the evolving landscape of Java development tools.

Drinks and food courtesy of our partners, Integral Ad Science, Stack and Co, FINEOS and tcube Dublin.

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About the Dublin Java User Group Since 2006, the Dublin Java User Group, aka DubJUG, has been working with the global Java community to amplify technical knowledge for the benefit of Irish based developers and businesses.