Duke's Corner Podcast

Duke’s Corner Podcast with Francisco Contreras, who is a Java developer and a co-organizer at Nicaragua JUG. Francisco has been a Java developer for over 15 years and he runs his own consulting business with customers around the world. He's passionate about Java the technology and also Java the community.

"When I learned Java at university I felt like I could do anything with that," he said, talking about how Java enables him to engage developers, write really great software, and also grow a business. But Java goes well beyond just technology. When Francisco had some personal challenges in his life, he was happy that many community members immediately offered to help him. "The sense of community in the Java environment is just awesome!"

Interview Archive

Duke’s Corner Podcast with Ivar Grimstad, who is a Java Champion, a JCP Executive Committee Member, and a Jakarta EE Developer Advocate. Ivar is based in Sweden but travels to over 40 events a year talking about Java and Open Source with thousands of developers.

He feels passionately about contributing to Java projects as the best way for young developers to learn Java and connect with the community, especially at Java conferences. Ivar has been working with Java professionally since 2000, but he's been solving problems with code since he was a little kid around 12 or 13 years old.

"Java has been my go-to language for everything!" he says. "It's been here for 30 years and it'll probably be around for 30 more!"

Interviews Archive

Transcript

00:00

Ivar Grimstad, welcome. Welcome to Duke's Corner.

0:02

Thank you, Jaymon. Happy to be here.

0:04

It's great to see you here. We met a couple of times. There was some recently at some conferences in Japan and elsewhere, and I thought it would be great to have a little session here on Duke's Corner to find out what you do. I see you are doing a lot of conferences.

0:21

You do a lot of travel and stuff. I sat in on your session in Tokyo, I guess about six months or so ago. And the audience was really into it. And so I figured, hey, I want to talk to this guy for this podcast here. So you're in Sweden and you're a developer advocate for Jakarta EE.

0:39

So let's start off with that. So what do you do as a dev advocate for Jakarta EE?

0:45

yeah so before i get into that i actually have a you you said we were meeting at conferences and stuff and i think we met i can't remember it and i certainly i'm sure you can't either but i'm pretty sure that we must have met at Java 1 in the Open Solaris launch sometime in the early 2000s.

1:07

Because I remember I was at Java 1, because you used to work with Open Solaris, right?

1:13

Yeah, yeah, I was at Simon. Open Solaris was my baby. Yeah, so I...

1:19

That was before like MacBooks were a thing and stuff. And so I went to Office Depot across the street from Moscone and I bought one of these small, you know, the small laptops, the mini laptops that had some version of Windows on it. And I just unpacked it,

1:37

brought it down to the Open Solaris Lounge and somebody there gave me a USB drive and I just plugged it in. I never booted it on Windows.

1:45

Oh, okay.

1:48

So since you were working with that, you must have been there. I got some really good help from the people in the lounge there to set up the drivers and stuff to get the keyboard to work. Yeah.

2:01

Oh, that's a great story. Yeah, this goes way back. That was so much fun. We had a bootable CD, and we had a USB, and that was like gold back then. Everything has changed now. Wow. Yeah.

2:18

Well, so, yeah, so Jakari, that's what I work with on a daily basis. And as I said, a lot of my work is speaking at conferences. So I travel around and do talks. So, yeah. That's basically what I do. Jakarta EE, that's the continuation of Java EE that used to be under the JCP at Sun and Oracle.

2:47

So that was moved over to Eclipse Foundation. And we continued it there and rebranded it to Jakarta EE from Java EE. I was so lucky to get into the role of the developer advocate there. So that's what I'm doing these days.

3:01

Cool. I mean, so if we crossed paths way back with Open Solaris at Sun, so you've been in this business for a while. You've been involved in open source and advocacy and community building basically for a long time.

3:15

Oh, yes. Yes. I thought back before I ended university or graduated from university in 98. I think in 96 or 97 was when I first encountered Java. Somebody talked about this stuff and I bought this book, Java 1.0 in a nutshell from the bookstore and went down to the computer room because we didn't have our own computers.

3:41

These old Unix machines logged in, had Java there and did Hello World. And that summer I worked, had a summer job at a consulting company in Oslo. And they put me on the client site because I had worked with them the year before so they trusted me.

4:00

And we were working on the internet banking for that Norwegian bank, and they were using Java, and they were doing it in Swing. So I was put on that, and I think I did some modifications to some of the Swing components they were using. So that was kind of the first...

4:18

time I was doing Java and the open source part of it that came a little later I got exposed to it through the mostly I think I can I can thank Java 1 for most of my this career path because that's where I got in you know the JCP and started getting

4:39

involved there and that was I guess it was back in 2017 2007 Seven, yeah. Where I signed the agreement with the JCP.

4:52

So it seems like the technology first and then the community second for you.

4:56

For me, at that point, it was. But it was sort of the community around Java that also... made it a natural thing for me. And also at that time, in the company I was working, we had lots of Java developers. This was a tech consultant company. And we had an internal,

5:16

what we call a Java competence group or sort of an internal jug or Java user group. where we had uh i think we had monthly meetings where we had technical like presentations and discussions and we also got people from the java bin which is the

5:33

java user group in oslo coming to present with us at the company and we also went to their event so so that's where i I started attending Java user groups. So that was the community that kind of brought me into there. But at the time, that early in my career,

5:50

I guess it was mostly the tech at work and community at the conferences I was allowed to go to. And that was usually a Java one every year those years.

6:01

Yeah, I've been to about 10 Java 1s over the years because I haven't always been involved in Java because I was on the Solaris project for, I guess, about a decade at Sun. We used to piggyback off of all the Java operations because they were very, very big, you know.

6:18

So we would go to their conferences basically and tag along. Yeah. And we did, you know, the Sun Tech Days had a big tour. And so we used to, you know, we used to go on that and we would obviously go to Java 1. One of these things about these open source projects is that they're so dynamic,

6:39

they just foster this notion of contribution. With Jakarta EE being Eclipse, obviously that's an open source project there, right? And Java itself is less... sort of the meta, that's the canonical open source project, right? A project of projects. Talk a little bit about this notion of contributing to open source in general, and specifically Java,

7:04

since you've seen a lot of it.

7:07

Definitely. And what I usually say when people are asking why you should get involved in, and also the reason why I got involved in open source is that we tend to consume a lot of open source technologies in our daily work. And at some point,

7:25

that scale is not even you don't contribute back to what you're actually consuming and and you're relying on a lot of these technologies. And if you're not contributing back, you're kind of losing control over over what's happening with this technology, which direction is it going? Is it fitting our needs?

7:46

Should we get involved to contribute back so we can kind of make sure it's still the technology we can rely on? So it's kind of a give and take, a win-win situation there. I think most contributions that are sustainable comes from when you are using the technology yourself.

8:07

So you're kind of feeling the pain points and you're figuring out it's easier for me to fix it than ask somebody else to do it. that was kind of my first contribution into open source that was actually sort of that but it wasn't related to java it was um scala that was was kind of coming at

8:28

that time and they had a lot of these getting started with scala guides like a couple of pages with some simple examples And they were translated to a lot of languages, but they didn't have t…

The Duke’s Corner Java Podcast contributed an 11 minute segment to the Community Keynote at JavaOne 2025 in California in March. Jim Grisanzio from Oracle Java Developer Relations hosted the program with special guests Cay Horstmann, Marit van Dijk, and Lize Raes. The panel covered the latest bits in Java, how to contribute to the community, and the best bits from JavaOne. Everyone had a great time!

Here’s the full Community Keynote session from JavaOne in March 2025. And here are 600 images and six video shorts I shot at the event.

All images from JavaOne 2025 here on Flickr.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome, everybody. Welcome to Duke's Corner Live. So Duke's Corner is a podcast that I started on the Oracle Java Developer Relations team in 2022. So we're just running about three years. We got about 60 episodes in the can. And in some ways, it's a very traditional podcast. We talk about Java, obviously, the community, hackers,

0:28

open source, things like this, a lot of education and learning. You know, Java developers have to keep up with everything and grow and things like that. So it's really cool in that respect and it's very informational. There's no frills. There's no bumper music or anything like that. It's just conversations.

0:44

But the most important thing for me is hearing the stories of Java developers. So sometimes you hear stories about, hey, I got to do X, Y, and Z. I have to learn this. I have to contribute to OpenJDK. What do I do? Things like that. but also you hear stories like, hey, Java saved my life.

1:03

Java, you took me out of poverty. I'm now able to fund my college education or things like that. These are the stories that really inspire me, and that's why I do the podcast. I'm really interested to hear the stories of developers, and through those stories, you learn about all the other things, Java, and Jugs,

1:29

you know, OpenJDK and everything else. But it's the profile. It's the story from the developer. So that's it. It's very simple. If you just search, you know, for Duke's Corner, you know, podcast, you'll find it and love you to listen. And I've met a lot of developers here, obviously,

1:45

so I'm excited to have some new programs in the coming year. But for the next few minutes here, let's just run a little session. I got a couple of my colleagues here in the background here, so we'll bring out Kai Hortzman and Marit van Dijk and Lisa Reis. We'll have a little session. Okay, welcome.

2:15

So let's talk tech, let's talk community and maybe get a little personal too. So Kai, lead us off with some tech here. So OpenJDK, you know, so Java 24, sorry, is out this week. And what's the most important thing that developers should pay attention to or

2:33

what's the most interesting thing in the latest releases to help them with productivity or just to do something really, really cool?

2:40

Well, every release has a lot of things, and I think everyone is different in what they like. What I was most excited about was the developments that help you write small Java programs more easily, both to learn Java and also to use Java in the small. It's actually a fantastic language. for smaller programs.

2:58

The other thing that I personally liked were there were some things that made my programs run better or faster or with less memory with me doing either nothing at all or very little. The garbage collector is getting even better. I'm excited about seeing Project Leiden where I can get my program to start up faster. Cool. Any thoughts?

3:20

Yeah, I'm excited about the stream gatherers that were released in Java 24, as well as advances in or improvements in pattern matching. I really enjoyed Brian Getz's talk on Tuesday about where the language is going and to get a bit of context and see how the changes are actually like progression in a direction.

3:45

I also really like that he mentioned that they're working on improving readability of the code. Mark Reinhold mentioned the same in the opening keynote. That's a topic dear to my heart because we read code more than we write code. So anything that makes it easier to read, easier to understand, easier to work with is great.

4:05

Excellent.

4:06

I also like very much, as Kai said, what makes it easier to ramp up and onboard in Java. So these simple source files, we're dropping the static. That's the big thing. I also saw somebody give a talk about Jupyter Notebooks for Java, and that just helps people getting onboarded so fast.

4:24

They say it's for people that are new to Java, but honestly, as a seasoned programmer, I also like it to just work faster. And the other thing I liked a lot, since I'm a collaborator on LangChain4J, which is working with AI and Java, we love this structured concurrency scope value,

4:40

which will make it much more easy to make agentic systems and to have this context for our LLMs. And, of course, everything that's more efficient, memory efficient, GPU acceleration that may be coming with Project Babylon, Project Valhalla, Project Panama. So I'm really looking forward to these things.

4:57

Cool. Well, it seems that there's endless. It's just an endless list here of really cool things. So we've got a lot of technology out there. We've got a lot of really interesting things for developers to grab a hold of and do things with. But how can developers actually participate in this community?

5:12

This is an open source community after all.

5:15

Yeah, so there are many ways to be involved in the community. Obviously, you can get up on stage and speak, but not everybody feels comfortable doing that. You can write blog posts or create videos or share your knowledge in other ways. But if you're not comfortable doing that, you can be involved in your local jugs,

5:34

you can help organize them, or even just attend and meet other people, share your experience, learn from and with each other.

5:45

Yeah, it may be a bit daunting for some developers to say, oh, I go on stage, oh, I write a blog even. And I just want to say there's something that you can do that's much lower threshold to help, and it is complain and give feedback. So in the opening keynote, Mark Reinhold,

6:01

Actually, what he did was saying, we're doing complaint-driven evolution of the Java language. And I like that because they go, look, what are the pain points? And that's where you can help. Tell us the pain points for your open source project, for the OpenJDK. And we will make the language better for you and for everybody else.

6:20

Yeah, I'd like to echo both of those points. First of all, just to show up at a meeting or anywhere. Showing up is great. When I give a presentation, I like to have people who are showing up. And the other thing is the complaint-driven development process has been working really well for Java. Java is very open.

6:36

There are multiple avenues for you to report your experiences with new features, say what you liked, and most importantly, what you didn't like. And there really are changes and improvements in the language that are based by programmer input.

6:52

Excellent. So there's many ways to contribute. You can even do a podcast, just like we're doing here, too. So one of the things I actually talk to a lot of developers about is what Java means to you in your heart, essentially. So do you have any thoughts about what Java means to you? It could be the technology,

7:08

some people like hacking, or it could be just the community or anything like that.

7:13

Well, I guess I'm a bit in a special situation because I was with Java from the very beginning. Before Java came out, my co-author, Gary Cornell, gave me a call and said, Kai, we're going to write a Java book. Neither of us knew anything about Java, so we had to learn it really fast.

7:26

And no one else knew anything about it either. But there we were when Java 1 was released with a stack of books. And ever since, I've been working with Java. I've really enjoyed interacting with the people that make Java happen, that make it better, and to learn more about it and to tea…

JavaOne 2025 message from Java Champion and JUG leader Richard Fichtner. Richard reviews his experiences from JavaOne in California and also encourages developers to participate at JCON 2025 upcoming in May in Germany.

Interviews Archive

Transcript

Howdy, folks. My name is Richard Fickner. I'm a Java champion and a JAG leader, and I'm here at the Java One, which is an awesome conference. I had some really good conversations here. It's great to meet the Java team. It's great to be back. So Java One was on pause for a year or two,

0:15

and now we're back, and we can get into action and into interaction with the folks that work on Java, on the platform, on the language. And it's great to have these conversations to see where Java is going. So this is more for the folks that have been with Java for many years.

0:31

Me and myself have been with Java for over 20 years, and so it's great to see how the language evolves. But even more important, it's to bring new people to Java. So we had a lot of discussions on day zero of the conference. There was a summit for educators in Java and Java in education.

0:49

So we discussed a lot of things, how we can bring new people, college students, high schoolers, and also people from different industries or different programming languages to the Java platform and to Java. And this is very exciting and this is also something we value highly at JCON Europe. This is a conference that I run back in Germany.

1:09

In Europe we have people from over 60 countries coming to JCON and we have a specialized beginner track because we find it's important to get people onto Java and start with a few things from the bottom up and it's always good also for me to get things from the bottom up.

1:26

This all new AI thing is just sweeping us all and it's great to see that Java is up to the challenge. So I recommend you come to JCon as you obviously missed Java 1 right now or come to Java 1 next year and learn with the Java community.

Message from JavaOne 2025 from Apostolos Giannakidis, a Java developer from Greece.

Archive

Transcript

Καλησπέρα. Ονομάζομαι Αποστόλης Γεννακίδης. Μόλις έδωσα μία ομιλία στο Java One για runtime security σε Java. Καταπληκτική εμπειρία. Προτείνω ανεπιφύλεκτα σε όλους να έρθουν στα Java One, αν μπορούν, όποτε μπορούν, θα συναντήσουν καταπληκτικούς ανθρώπους, ανθρώπους που διαμορφώνουν την τεχνολογία της Java. Τους ίδιους ανθρώπους που είναι οι αρχιτέκτονες της γλώσσας. Δεν υπάρχει καλύτερο event

0:26

πέρα από το Java One για να συναντήσετε τους ανθρώπους που φτιάχνουν την τεχνολογία και θα μάθετε μέσα από αυτούς πράγματα που δεν θα έχετε την ευκαιρία να συναντήσετε κάποιο. Ήτανε καταπληκτική εμπειρία, είμαι ευγνώμων που βρέθηκα εδώ και μπόρεσε και έδωσε μια ομιλία σε ένα τόσο σημαντικό συνέδριο. Χαιρετήσματα στην Ελλάδα και σε όλους τους φίλους μου.

Message from JavaOne 2025 from Japan Java User Group (JJUG) member and Java engineer Daishi Tabata.

Archive

Transcript

初めてJava 1に参加したんですけれど、長年参加されている日本の方々が温かく迎えてくれてとても楽しめています。セッションも実際の機能を作った方々が話されているのを聞くことができるというのは貴重な機会で良かったと思います。 ただ今回は初めて来て英語がやっぱり結構苦労しているので、また次回以降も参加してたくさん学べるようになるためには、いっぱい勉強がいるなというふうに思っています。また次回もぜひ参加したいです。ありがとうございました。

Message from JavaOne 2025 from Japan Java User Group (JJUG) leader and OpenJDK Committer Chihiro Ito.

Archive

Transcript

オープンJDKコミッターの伊藤千尋です今回のJava 1ではプロジェクトライデンとかバーチャルスレッドとかAI関連のバビロンというプロジェクトについていろいろ最新情報を知ることができましたぜひ日本のJavaエンジニアの皆さんも次回開催されるJava 1に参加していただきこのような情報を入手していただければと思いますありがとうございました

Message from JavaOne 2025 in California from Japan Java User Group (JJUG) leader Takaaki Sugiyama.

Archive

Transcript

2005年にJava1に来たのが初めてでそれからちょうど20年なんですよね何回も来るうちに知り合いも増えて日本人だけじゃなくて海外の知り合いであるとかこっちのJavaチャンピオンであるとかすごい人たちに囲まれてすごい刺激をここで受けてまた日本に帰ってこれを日本のみんなに伝えてこういうふうに今Javaが いかに熱い言語になっているかということをもう一度再確認してモチベーションを高めていきたいなと思っています

Message from JavaOne 2025 from Japan Java User Group (JJUG) leader and Java Champion Shin Tanimoto.

Archive

Transcript

J J U G 代 表 で J a v a C h a m p i o n の 谷 本 で す 今 日 久 々 に 2 年 ぶ り か 3 年 ぶ り に J a v a 1 に 来 た ん で す け ど 今 回 の J a v a

0:08

1 は オ ラ ク ル 社 で 開 催 さ れ て い て ま だ 規 模 は 小 さ く て 1 0 0 0 人 以 下 ぐ ら い な ん で す け ど そ こ 結 構 セ ッ シ ョ ン が い っ ぱ い あ っ て

0:21

N e t f l i x の 事 例 と か あ と 最 近 の も ち ろ ん J D K の 新 機 能 と か の 説 明 が い っ ぱ い あ っ て ち ょ っ と 2 , 3 年 J a v a の 勉 強 を 自 分 が し て な か っ た う ち に す ご い い ろ ん な 新 機 能 が 追 加 さ れ て て ま た ち ょ っ と 一 か ら 勉 強 し な き ゃ い け な い な っ て 思 う も の が た く さ ん あ っ て い い 刺 激 に な り ま し た こ れ か ら J a v a は も っ と 大 き く な っ て い く と 思 う ん で で き れ ば 毎 年 参 加 し て い き た い と 思 い ま す 皆 さ ん も ぜ ひ 来 て く だ さ い お 願 い し ま す

The Duke’s Corner Java Podcast contributed an 11 minute segment to the Community Keynote at JavaOne 2025 in California in March. Jim Grisanzio from Oracle Java Developer Relations hosted the program with special guests Cay Horstmann, Marit van Dijk, and Lize Raes. The panel covered the latest bits in Java, how to contribute to the community, and the best bits from JavaOne. Everyone had a great time!

Here’s the full Community Keynote session from JavaOne in March 2025.

Archive

All images from JavaOne 2025.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome, everybody. Welcome to Duke's Corner Live. So Duke's Corner is a podcast that I started on the Oracle Java Developer Relations team in 2022. So we're just running about three years. We got about 60 episodes in the can. And in some ways, it's a very traditional podcast. We talk about Java, obviously, the community, hackers,

0:28

open source, things like this, a lot of education and learning. You know, Java developers have to keep up with everything and grow and things like that. So it's really cool in that respect and it's very informational. There's no frills. There's no bumper music or anything like that. It's just conversations.

0:44

But the most important thing for me is hearing the stories of Java developers. So sometimes you hear stories about, hey, I got to do X, Y, and Z. I have to learn this. I have to contribute to OpenJDK. What do I do? Things like that. but also you hear stories like, hey, Java saved my life.

1:03

Java, you took me out of poverty. I'm now able to fund my college education or things like that. These are the stories that really inspire me, and that's why I do the podcast. I'm really interested to hear the stories of developers, and through those stories, you learn about all the other things, Java, and Jugs,

1:29

you know, OpenJDK and everything else. But it's the profile. It's the story from the developer. So that's it. It's very simple. If you just search, you know, for Duke's Corner, you know, podcast, you'll find it and love you to listen. And I've met a lot of developers here, obviously,

1:45

so I'm excited to have some new programs in the coming year. But for the next few minutes here, let's just run a little session. I got a couple of my colleagues here in the background here, so we'll bring out Kai Hortzman and Marit van Dijk and Lisa Reis. We'll have a little session. Okay, welcome.

2:15

So let's talk tech, let's talk community and maybe get a little personal too. So Kai, lead us off with some tech here. So OpenJDK, you know, so Java 24, sorry, is out this week. And what's the most important thing that developers should pay attention to or

2:33

what's the most interesting thing in the latest releases to help them with productivity or just to do something really, really cool?

2:40

Well, every release has a lot of things, and I think everyone is different in what they like. What I was most excited about was the developments that help you write small Java programs more easily, both to learn Java and also to use Java in the small. It's actually a fantastic language. for smaller programs.

2:58

The other thing that I personally liked were there were some things that made my programs run better or faster or with less memory with me doing either nothing at all or very little. The garbage collector is getting even better. I'm excited about seeing Project Leiden where I can get my program to start up faster. Cool. Any thoughts?

3:20

Yeah, I'm excited about the stream gatherers that were released in Java 24, as well as advances in or improvements in pattern matching. I really enjoyed Brian Getz's talk on Tuesday about where the language is going and to get a bit of context and see how the changes are actually like progression in a direction.

3:45

I also really like that he mentioned that they're working on improving readability of the code. Mark Reinhold mentioned the same in the opening keynote. That's a topic dear to my heart because we read code more than we write code. So anything that makes it easier to read, easier to understand, easier to work with is great.

4:05

Excellent.

4:06

I also like very much, as Kai said, what makes it easier to ramp up and onboard in Java. So these simple source files, we're dropping the static. That's the big thing. I also saw somebody give a talk about Jupyter Notebooks for Java, and that just helps people getting onboarded so fast.

4:24

They say it's for people that are new to Java, but honestly, as a seasoned programmer, I also like it to just work faster. And the other thing I liked a lot, since I'm a collaborator on LangChain4J, which is working with AI and Java, we love this structured concurrency scope value,

4:40

which will make it much more easy to make agentic systems and to have this context for our LLMs. And, of course, everything that's more efficient, memory efficient, GPU acceleration that may be coming with Project Babylon, Project Valhalla, Project Panama. So I'm really looking forward to these things.

4:57

Cool. Well, it seems that there's endless. It's just an endless list here of really cool things. So we've got a lot of technology out there. We've got a lot of really interesting things for developers to grab a hold of and do things with. But how can developers actually participate in this community?

5:12

This is an open source community after all.

5:15

Yeah, so there are many ways to be involved in the community. Obviously, you can get up on stage and speak, but not everybody feels comfortable doing that. You can write blog posts or create videos or share your knowledge in other ways. But if you're not comfortable doing that, you can be involved in your local jugs,

5:34

you can help organize them, or even just attend and meet other people, share your experience, learn from and with each other.

5:45

Yeah, it may be a bit daunting for some developers to say, oh, I go on stage, oh, I write a blog even. And I just want to say there's something that you can do that's much lower threshold to help, and it is complain and give feedback. So in the opening keynote, Mark Reinhold,

6:01

Actually, what he did was saying, we're doing complaint-driven evolution of the Java language. And I like that because they go, look, what are the pain points? And that's where you can help. Tell us the pain points for your open source project, for the OpenJDK. And we will make the language better for you and for everybody else.

6:20

Yeah, I'd like to echo both of those points. First of all, just to show up at a meeting or anywhere. Showing up is great. When I give a presentation, I like to have people who are showing up. And the other thing is the complaint-driven development process has been working really well for Java. Java is very open.

6:36

There are multiple avenues for you to report your experiences with new features, say what you liked, and most importantly, what you didn't like. And there really are changes and improvements in the language that are based by programmer input.

6:52

Excellent. So there's many ways to contribute. You can even do a podcast, just like we're doing here, too. So one of the things I actually talk to a lot of developers about is what Java means to you in your heart, essentially. So do you have any thoughts about what Java means to you? It could be the technology,

7:08

some people like hacking, or it could be just the community or anything like that.

7:13

Well, I guess I'm a bit in a special situation because I was with Java from the very beginning. Before Java came out, my co-author, Gary Cornell, gave me a call and said, Kai, we're going to write a Java book. Neither of us knew anything about Java, so we had to learn it really fast.

7:26

And no one else knew anything about it either. But there we were when Java 1 was released with a stack of books. And ever since, I've been working with Java. I've really enjoyed interacting with the people that make Java happen, that make it better, and to learn more about it and to teach with it.

7:44

One of my best experiences, I thought, was when we were able to move the AP computer science exam from C++ to Java.

7:52

Cool. Yeah, I first learned Java in university, not quite from the beginning. I learned Java 1.2. We won't do the math on how long ago that was. And then I did a bunch of other jobs in IT and had to relearn Java, which was Java 8 at the time,

8:08

which was much improved from what I remembered from university. And I actually relearned Java by reading books by... Gene Bajarski and Scott Selikoff for the OCA OCP guides, as well as a book by Mala Gupta, who is now my colleague and teammate. So yeah, that worked out really well for me.

8:28

I really like how she explains Java concepts really well. And it's been part of my career ever since.

8:36

Beautiful.

8:36

That's a really exciting trajectory. For me, I can certainly not say that I was with Java from the beginning because I was five years old. But I started, I actually came in from the side, I started electronics engineering. So at the beginning when I started as a regular Java developer,

8:52

it was hard for me and Java was mainly the way where I could not do what I wanted. But I got better. I learned it. And now Java is really a way for me to build, to change my ideas into something tangible in the real world. And then I started contributing.

9:07

And now it brought me here on stage. So it's been really a huge, become a huge love story by now.

9:13

Excellent. Okay, we just have a minute and a half left here, so let's wrap up by talking about this conference here this week. It's been a blistering week. It's a lot of happy faces. Everyone's been really cool. For us, the team who are organizing this, we're all tired and exhausted, but it's been really a beautiful experience.

9:31

I'm wondering if you have any impressions about this week.

9:35

Well, I'm very glad that Java 1 has been back and that the hallway track is as good as it always was. I've learned so much.

9:43

Yeah, it's been really good attending talks by people who actually work on the language and getting a lot of context on why changes are made. But the most important part is the people seeing everyone here.

9:55

I also find it really exciting to hear from the architects themselves, where they are evolving, what they just built, show their own demos. And one talk stuck with me, that was the talk about somebody at Jefferson Lab, where they do nuclear physics in a particle accelerator. They started using AI instead of analytical methods to fix this,

10:15

using a Java framework, Deepnets, which you can just download, it's free for individual use, so I just did that yesterday. They managed to speed up this analytics from needing many, many, many CPUs and all data centers to get it on one laptop, 5,000 times more efficient to track these collision paths by AI.

10:34

I'm getting really excited from these real-world use cases that we can do with Java.

10:39

Excellent. Well, thank you. Thank you very much for joining me. And that's just a little snip of Duke's Corner. And we did it live here. And next up on the show here is my colleague David DeLabasse to talk about the Quality Outreach Program. And that's it. Thank you. And have a good rest of the show. Cheers.