Jim Grisanzio from Oracle Java Developer Relations talks with Carlos Obregón at JavaOne 2026. Carlos is a Java Champion and also the founder of Bogota's Java User Group, Bogotá JVM. Carlos has been running monthly meetups for over a decade, and he and his colleagues have built one of the most active developer communities in Latin America. In his session at JavaOne — Teaching Java as a First Language: Lessons from Three Years of a Real-World Bootcamp — he outlined a free, online, 13-week week program for learning Java. The bootcamp started in Colombia but then quickly expanded to include multiple JUGs in Latin American.

"Java is the best language for this" he said. The community, the tooling, the syntax, the readability of the language itself — everything pointed in the right direction. And the students in the bootcamp agree. "They love Java" he said. Carlos started out programming in C++ in school, but from the moment he finally picked up Java it was obviously different. "It was Love at first sight" he said.

Carlos also advises that developers embrace AI. "Think of it like your pair programming buddy," he said. But he said to go deeply into programming fundamentals first because if you can't evaluate what the AI produces then you may end up shipping bugs you don't understand.

JavaOne was an amazing experience for Carlos. It was his first JavaOne, but he'll be back for sure.