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 the Norwegian translation. So I translated it into Norwegian and committed it to their subversion or whatever they had.

8:50

And they had one comment back about some of the formats I've used in the documents. So I fixed those and they accepted it and it was published on the webpage the next day. So that was kind of a big thing to have my name out there on some piece of stuff that people could use.

9:07

So how long did that take to do? It wasn't a big document, so some hours, maybe a day or two in total. So I just spread it out a little.

9:18

So you truly understood the concept then in terms of actually doing some work and contributing it back and then seeing the result of that. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting because sometimes I ask that question and I get these very interesting stories where somebody will say that they did a contribution and they

9:37

wrote up a blog about it and then went to bed, right? Just, you know, here's the contribution. This is what I did. They submitted it and then just, you know, articulated, you know, this is what I did basically in a blog post and went to bed and then woke up the next morning and they've got like 500,

9:51

you know, comments on the blog and stuff. Yeah. And this thing is sneaking through whatever million list they contributed to and everything. And they're just so blown away by the result of the contribution. I find that fascinating.

10:05

It is. Yeah. And I think many people who are kind of struggling with where should I start? What should I do there? Maybe they're thinking a little bit too big and thinking, hey, I can fix this big, massive project that everybody is using rather than focusing on this is a little

10:23

piece of code or piece of document or a graphic. It doesn't have to be code to be open source contribution. It can be anything, especially documentation and tutorials are what all open source projects are super happy to have contributions on. So it could be a small piece

10:40

Like my three-page or whatever Norwegian translation, it doesn't take me much effort to do it. But it is actually a fairly visible thing because it's one piece of work that can be published. And if you contribute to, for example, a super vital if statement that solves a big security problem internally in some open source app server,

11:06

You may have saved the world, but people may never notice that it was here because it's just hidden down there. So find some kind of thing that you can actually show, like the blog post you're talking about, show what you've done.

11:20

I was at a conference once, actually it was last year in Vietnam. It was FOSS Asia, and there were 5,000 students there. And it was really kind of cool because it was just all these kids. They're all 22, 23, 24 years old and from multiple universities in Vietnam.

11:41

And a lot of them would ask, what can I do? Because they hadn't left Vietnam. They're too young. They haven't traveled, but they know this stuff is global. And all these projects are global. And I said, well, I mean, you can start a user group. You can get involved in user groups.

12:00

But think in terms of contributing something. Take what you're learning in school and do some sort of contribution. Get involved in GitHub. Get your name out there within the project that you're interested in. And start small. And if you do that as a student, when you graduate, you already have a portfolio.

12:19

And they thought that was a really great idea, and they were really excited about it. And a bunch of them were actually learning Java. And it was really interesting to see. I like to talk about this concept of contributing because it sort of equals the playing field. There's a lot of famous people in technology and stuff,

12:36

and there's a lot of people who are new and they're young, right? What can you do? Well, you can contribute. And also, for me, it's like I've changed careers multiple times. I got into this career really late. I'm older than everybody. And I got in because of this specific reason is things move fast and you can

12:55

contribute and you can get yourself known. Because not all professions have this concept. Yeah.

13:03

Yeah, so when I chose this kind of career path, my family were, are you sure you want to do this? People are, things are happening so fast there. You have to always learn. You can never, you know, in many other professions, you can just learn your trade and then just do it, you know. And continue.

13:25

But in our industry, you have to learn continuously. And the second you stop learning, especially these days with AI coming in all over the place, and if you're not on top of it, it's hard to stay here in this industry. And one of the best ways of learning things is by doing. Like we learn with our fingers.

13:48

We learn by doing it. You can read a lot of books about programming, but when you start actually doing the coding, that's when you learn. I mean, that's not special for our industry. I mean, who would go on a plane if the pilot had learned flying by reading about it?

14:09

So it's learning by doing and the best way of getting away from just the sort of exercises you have at schools and university and doing something that is actually industry relevant. is an open source project that many people are using. And if you can contribute and learn so much about that technology that you can

14:30

contribute to it and learn by doing it, by building that open source technology, you're actually building, you're giving yourself the benefit of learning. So contribution is by the word itself, it's you give something, you know, but it's actually you're getting something because you're getting all this knowledge by doing it.

14:50

And that's what's fascinating about open source that we can just, you know, trade this. I do this and I learn this. also when you when you contribute to an open source project there are usually committers there that has been there for a long time and many of them are like you

15:05

say famous in this industry has written books or speakers at conferences or are well-known figures in the industry and you get to learn with them by solving problems together with them so you you learn from the best and you see how they write code how they solve problems So it is the best way of learning, I think.

15:27

So by doing that with telling the students in Vietnam to go out and contribute to learn, that's the best way of doing it.

15:37

Yeah, it's interesting. I've spoken with many developers who have told me that their first experience maybe at a conference and there would be approaching one of the senior developers with like a question or something after a session and they were so surprised that the you know senior or famous person was so willing to just

15:58

chat for like a half an hour in the hallway about this obscure bug that they found somewhere you know and there's a really famous people you know it's like I was talking to Gosling, and he just was going off and off and off on this great thing.

16:12

You're talking to James Gosling here, and he gave you all that time. That's a normal story. Same thing with Venkat Subramanian. He's a sweet guy. He loves to teach. He loves to engage people. He goes to be in big conferences and stuff, but he also goes to small user groups. He interacts with everybody at all levels.

16:34

So I think what you said is really apt in the sense of the more senior people, the more famous people many times are very humble and they just want to chat about technology.

16:45

Yeah, and we have this technology that kind of unites us. And because most of us are, some are more geeky than others, but we're usually, we're coders, we're probably geeks in everybody else's eyes. And many of us are introverts, even though if we're speakers, we're not necessarily comfortable in a social context.

17:08

But when we have this technology together that we can talk about, then we can open up more easily. Yeah.

17:13

That's really interesting you say that because although I'm not a coder, I've taken a few programming classes in school and stuff, but I can't say anything without a camera in my hand. So when I go to a conference, I'm usually taking photographs, right? Even if I'm working and managing the event,

17:32

which I had to do a lot of times at Oracle and previously at Sun, where we'd have to actually manage the event or run a user group, something like that. I always have my camera with me to shoot the event because I'm always interested in profiling developers and stuff.

17:45

But I can't talk to anybody socially unless I have the damn camera with me. So it's a topic of conversation. So when you were in school, did you choose software for any of these specific reasons or you just like complex solving puzzles and complex problems? Yeah.

18:05

Yeah, so I feel I just slipped into this career path by coincidence. I think I am a problem solver. I was good at math and physics and those kind of subjects. I got a computer fairly early. It was a, I don't know if anybody knows, it was a Sharp MC700 or something. It has an integrated cassette player.

18:30

So I could load it with BASIC on a cassette. So I learned a little bit of coding on that one, but it was mostly games. My coding started, I think, when I got a Commodore 128, which came with BASIC when you open it up. And I had this...

18:52

a little program on my sharp computer that I could use to test me in words you know when we were learning English at school or English and French at school you had this test you get 20 words that you have to know until tomorrow and then you got a

19:07

test just translated and this program let me type in the words and the translations and it would test me until I had all 30 words correct Cool. It's like an algorithm. But the Commodore didn't have this. So I made it. I coded it in BASIC. So I could still test myself in these words.

19:28

And that was my first programming thing. After that, I elected some programming at the high school I was at, where we learned some Pascal coding, mostly by writing on paper. Because the computer room were limited access to, so we can only get in there like a couple of hours or so.

19:49

So we had to write the programs on paper first and then have them evaluated by the teacher. He was kind of the walking compiler and then typing in. Different times, you know. At that time, when I was like 12, 13, I would say I was probably a decent programmer. I could solve problems using code.

20:11

But when I came to university, the others were so much more clever and so much better because they were really into this kind of stuff more than me. So I was still the problem solver, but not necessarily the one typing the code.

20:28

So what was the difference with them, though?

20:30

I'm not sure, actually. But I think my interests were as far as it's sort of useful within the kind of the ecosystem I know about. And that was sort of having the cassette tapes were my interface to the world. I didn't have a modem or anything. So internet wasn't a thing then. Yeah, yeah.

20:54

But these guys had probably were in environments where they had some... Internet, it was in these young days. So I started university in 93. So internet was there, but it wasn't like web browsers and stuff. It was just you logged into a terminal and text-based everything. But they've been doing that for a while, I think.

21:16

So they had been in these more hacker kind of environments. Right. at home, and were more, yeah, I'm going to just have a master's degree in programming, where I was just, I wanted to be a marine engineer, and I didn't get in there, so I ended up on computer science.

21:40

But after the first classes, I felt at home there, and yeah, this is my thing. When did you trip over Java? It must have been in 96 or 97.

21:55

So right around Java, yeah.

21:58

Yes, it was Java 1.0, and I wrote the Hello World on the Unix terminal at the university. And I got to use it in a, well, quote-unquote, professional capacity at my summer job in 97. And I started using it in work around 99, 2000, and ever since, yeah.

22:24

So it's been your main focus since then?

22:26

Yes, it has been. I've touched into other programming languages, but I've ended up with Java. That's been my go-to language for everything. I guess it is. I think Jane Gosling, he wanted to be the blue-collar language. It's a multipurpose language you can use for anything.

22:46

It's kind of the thing you would use to solve the most problems with. Not kind of the special cases, you would use something else, but most cases you can use Java. And I think the timing when I started working, Java was conquering the server side. So everything was J2EE at that time.

23:08

And that was a money machine for everybody around there. All the old COBOL systems had to be replaced by J2EE because they had to solve this 2000 year problem anyway. So they had to do something and J2EE was there. And it was a brilliant technology at the time. And that was when I started working with it.

23:28

So that's been my thing since.

23:31

So you've had the benefit of seeing really the whole evolution of Java. So let's talk a little bit about the technology. I always ask everybody, why Java? What makes it special? Because, I mean, like in your case, it's been your primary focus for your whole adult career. So talk a little bit about the evolution.

23:53

You talked a little bit about how you got involved early on and now we're 30 years later here. 30 years old, I guess next month is Java. Why Java? What makes it special?

24:05

Yeah, it's a good question. I think at the time, Java was everywhere. If you were working anywhere as a consultant, coder, programmer in the industry, you were using Java for everything. It works for most things. The language itself, I guess... People complain that it's too verbose, it's too complicated to do certain things.

24:35

I think it's one of the good things about why Java is still around here is its simplicity and its readability, its simple rules. The things that made C++ hard, for example, isn't hard in Java. You have the garbage collector.

24:51

I hope you don't have to think about the memory things, the issues you would have in C and C++. The multiple inheritance that you have in Java. C++ just makes things hard. People miss it and Java says that by not having it, it's hard. But I think having these kind of simple guidelines when they created the language

25:12

makes it easy to learn, easy to use. And if you look at how it's evolved over these years, oh my god, it's... When generics came in Java 5, I mean, that was a big thing for us to get over. And then the next one, I guess, was Java 8 when you get streams.

25:32

And now the releases are coming so fast that you don't remember anything that's coming in the different versions. But it's evolving and taking away these small pain points slowly and still being relevant after 30 years. I think it's impressive. But it's a good question, why Java, why not something else? It's been here for 30 years.

25:53

It's probably going to be here for 30 years or more.

25:57

It's interesting you mentioned C and C++. I remember taking C and kind of liking it. I can handle it, right? And then I took C++ and I choked. I vomited immediately. It just didn't sit at all with me. I'm happy to hear that Java solved that problem. Okay.

26:20

Yeah, I think from learning the basic on Commodore machines and then using Pascal, which is more like function-oriented, and when I saw C for the first time, I thought it was, well, this is just complicated. Where is the real words, like the begin and the end of the functions? It's these stupid curly braces. I don't understand them.

26:47

But then Java came around and it had this stuff and you got used to it.

26:54

Okay, so you got involved in the technology and the community, you were contributing, and you also got involved in the JCP. Yes. The Java Community Process, which is a specification body. How did that come along?

27:10

Yeah, that's a good story, actually, because it also shows what can be a motivating factor of these things. And I'll keep coming back to Java 1, because I think Java 1 has had a big impact on my career. One of the things at Java 1 was that all these bofs at evenings where they had

27:32

these JSRs that presented discussions and JSR, Java specification requests, and all these acronyms. It was JAXRS and JAXWS and JAXXML and whatever. It's all these. these words and at the beginning it was so impressive to just sitting in a room and hear people saying these letters like it meant something and not understand a

27:56

single thing and then started slowly to understand and then oh yeah it's JSRs and started noticing people with these ribbons on their badges that said specification lead or expert group member and that and it kind of got curious how do I get that ribbon So you started going to these booths at Excavation Floor, figuring out the JCP,

28:20

and I signed up for it. I signed like a 40-page print. You had to print out a document, like sign it on a couple of pages and fax it to some. That was at the time we had fax machines. And I got to become a JCP member.

28:36

And then I just randomly chose some expert groups to see if I can get in there. And nobody accepted me until because they were all like pretty mature and established until there was a new one coming out. That was the MVC, a new specification.

28:52

And I had done my share development of like web frameworks and that kind of thing. So I thought this is good for me. So I applied for that one and I got in. So suddenly I was an expert group member of the MVC specification. We had bi-weekly calls. So I got that ribbon.

29:12

And I also met Heather from the JCP there at Java 1. And she introduced me to the executive committee. And I heard that as an associate member of the executive committee, Oracle would pay for the travels to these meetings. And I like traveling, so yeah, why not go? So I ran the election to become an expert member.

29:40

So I got into the executive committee of the JZB as an individual. And I've been there ever since. That was in 2013, I ran that election, I think.

29:51

Well, that's really great. And that's also a huge contribution as well. I mean, you have to run, you have to be elected, right?

29:56

Yeah. And I also was contributing a little bit, at least, to the MVC specification. And to that story also that when Java EE8 came out in 2016, MVC was supposed to be a part of it. But right before the announcement of Java EE8, Oracle announced that we're not taking MVC in. We're canceling that one.

30:22

And we were almost done, or we thought we were done, because we had done the spec and the API. And we had an implementation. We thought we had a TCK, because we didn't do that. There was some team at Oracle that did that one.

30:36

So I asked at one of these buffs at Java 1, I asked, but it's almost done. Can't we just finish it, somebody outside of Oracle, if you don't want to do it? They asked me, yeah, but who would do that? I said, I would do it.

30:53

So I got the IP rights for the MVC specification and the implementation signed over to me by Oracle. So suddenly I owned the IP. of this specification. And I brought in, I had some other German friends, Christian Kaltipoth, which I brought on as a co-spec lead with me.

31:14

And we finalized that spec under the JCP and released it, MVC 1.0 there. we brought it over to the Eclipse Foundation. And actually, a month ago, we released MVC 3.0. So it's still going strong. And now, no, I don't have the IPO of that one. I gave that away. I contributed to the Eclipse Foundation.

31:33

So that's a fully open source project.

31:37

So a lot of benefits there. I mean, a lot of opportunity. I mean, what you've just described is a chain of opportunities.

31:44

Yeah, it is. And it's also, I remember also being at conferences like Java One. And I think if I should recommend a young developer, what should I do for training? What books should I read? What should I do to get better at something? My standard answer is always go to a conference and continue doing it.

32:06

Because what I experienced was I had the opportunity to go to Java 1 every year and also maybe some other conferences in between during the year. By doing that continuously, I learned more and more and more and got inspired. Every time I come back from one of these conferences,

32:26

I ended up buying a bunch of books because I'd seen those speakers. They'd also written books. So I went home and bought their books, read them, and I learned more. And next year, repeat. Until you get to that point where you're sitting at a conference in a room, you're listening, it's probably a fabulously good talk.

32:45

But you're starting thinking, I could be up there. I now know so much that I could actually consider myself being a speaker. And I started submitting talks. And that's how I stumbled into the speaker circuit. And that's almost 15 years ago that I submitted my first talk and got accepted to an international conference.

33:07

And since that, the ball is rolling. Now I do 40 conferences a year. Wow. All over the world.

33:13

That's a lot. That's a lot. I can't match that. Very few people can match that. That's just constant travel. Obviously, you're meeting hundreds of developers every year. I mean, thousands in terms of the number of people who are attending your session, but you're talking to certainly hundreds of people throughout the year.

33:33

Any interesting trends that you can see from the last few years? Yeah.

33:37

I think it's very different from which part of the world you're going to. Actually, I have a feeling that Java had some struggle a couple of years ago where everybody was, no, you have to go to other languages. But it was usually on the JVM. It was Groovy or Scala or it was Kotlin or something else.

34:04

But nowadays I feel people are sort of coming back a little bit or Java isn't irrelevant any longer that people were telling us a couple of years ago. So I see, I wasn't kidding when I said probably 30 more years. So I think Java is going strong.

34:24

I see a lot of younger developers out there are very interested in Java. And one concern we have nowadays is that universities tend to jump on the latest, or not necessarily the latest, but the easier path of learning. So they're choosing to learn Python to students rather than Java.

34:45

And developers come out and get the first job, and it's usually Java. they get exposed to so so having these initiatives like we have in the jcp with java in education to to educate the university that i still have to learn java because that's what the industry wants still i think it's um it's interesting

35:08

another observation is is these cycles that we go through you know we always tend to think that we have invented something new and then we just dial back the time machine and yeah we did it 20 years ago you know interesting so yeah i won't get into the like server

35:26

started rendering people are talking like react server side components was a new thing like man we had servlets back in 2000 or even before you know so

35:38

I see you have your J-Jug t-shirt on there. I do. Java. Yeah, the user group up in Tokyo. Actually, it's all over Japan. I'm in Osaka, so I'm a little bit further south or west, I guess. So what's next for you? We're in mid-25, actually May of 25 here. What's up next? What's your next event?

36:05

Tomorrow I'm going to J-Con in Germany. I'm actually going back to Tokyo in June for the J-Jug CCC Spring event. Cool.

36:17

Well, when you go to Germany to say hello to Char, he'll be there. And a couple of my teammates will be there as well. That's an important event for our team that we usually go. And we're Oracle sponsoring as well. So there'll be a bunch of stuff there. You're also a Java champion.

36:35

So I'm sure there'll be plenty of Java champions that you cross paths with at these events, right? Yeah. How did that come about?

36:41

The Java Champions, that was... I had never heard of it. But then at some conference, I can't remember which one, but it was someone was pulled up on stage and given a jacket and called a Java Champion. And then I sort of, okay, this is a thing. So I started recognizing and seeing these Java Champions around.

37:01

And I thought that maybe I should... should make myself be a candidate for it. So I know there are five like criterias of things that you should fulfill more or less. So I kind of make sure that I covered them all for myself. So I am a Java user group leader, I'm doing conferences, I'm doing blogging,

37:25

social media, I'm doing a cool open source project contributing to technologies and all these kind of other community building aspects that the Java champions are. And I was suggested as a Java champion and got my jacket on the stage at DevOps UK a couple of years later. So, yeah.

37:48

It's a beautiful jacket.

37:50

Yeah, it is. And one funny thing is when I tell people I'm a Java champion or people that aren't familiar with the program, they think, oh, you have to be very good at Java. And I say, no, I'm probably not. And I mean, I know a way around it, but I'm not a very good Java programmer.

38:09

That's nothing to do with, you're not a champion of Java. You're championing Java. So it's about getting Java out to the people. I think that's a, people get a little bit surprised when I tell them that. And then you see, some of them you see, which are probably very good Java developers and think,

38:31

I'm the best Java developer in the world. I should be a Java champion. But when I said, and they asked me, how should I become a Java champion? I say, well, you can start coming to the Java user group and you can start presenting on the Java user group because it's all about the community.

38:47

And you see just the light goes off in their eyes and they turn around and go away.

38:53

Yeah, I mean, that's true. I mean, there's a lot of people who just are coding behind the firewall and they're happy. And that's fine. That's their role, too. But what's also interesting about that is many times those people, especially early on in their career, they're not necessarily aware of the community anymore.

39:13

And they discover the community through work. And they cross the firewall. They go to a user group. They go to a conference. And they meet friends. And they get problems solved. And their career explodes as a result of that. So the community is so big. I mean, there's millions and millions.

39:30

And there's all different people doing different things at different levels. Yeah. What you said about the Java Champions is very true. I mean, I talked to a lot of JCs. I'm involved with managing the program through Oracle. I mean, it's an independent project, program, so to speak, but it's sort of sponsored by Oracle.

39:49

And so I work on that. So I've gotten to know a lot of you guys over the last few years since I joined this team in 22, the Java Developer Relations team. Yeah. It is true. I mean, some of them are highly technical and they're just hacking on the JVM and some of

40:06

them are more generalists and some of them do a lot of community building. I mean, there's just a variety of people. So it's very interesting for me. I do a lot of learning through my interactions with them. All right. Well, Ivar, it's been great talking to you. Is there anything that you can leave us with?

40:24

Is there any words of wisdom, any interesting stories, anything or anything I've forgot to ask you that I should have?

40:32

i feel i've just been rambling on for an hour now but i don't know i i i say you should listen to duke's corners podcast because that's where the real stuff is so cool go back and listen to previous episodes and upcoming episodes and if you want

40:49

to skip this one fine but uh we'll appreciate if you listen to this one as well

40:54

No, I only talk to good people. It's interesting because sometimes I talk to someone like yourself as well now and someone who has no name recognition at all. But I learn from every single one of you guys because you all have different stories and different perspectives on things. I do it because Oracle lets me do it,

41:16

so that's really cool, but I find it a learning experience. And it's something I can actually do. I enjoy it. So thanks for the plug.

41:25

Cool. Learning while enjoying. That should be our slogan.

41:31

Absolutely. Absolutely. All right, my friend. I will see you at a conference because you're everywhere. I'm sure I'll trip over you somewhere sometime soon.

41:41

Yeah. Thank you very much for having me here. It's been a pleasure.

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