JCrete 2026 was just as good as the previous ones that I have attended, and that has been quite a few. I think my first time was in 2016 or maybe in 2015, but I am not entirely sure. It is a yearly tradition for me now to go to JCrete during summer.

For those that don’t know, JCrete is an unConference. That means that nobody is a speaker, and everybody is a speaker. The program is made up the program as we go, so you never know which themes that will be discussed. The only thing you know is that whatever happens is the right thing, and whatever outcome is the right one.

In addition to the sessions, which are limited to four half-days, there are excursions to nearby beaches, morning runs, walks, bike rides, hiking and diving. Something for everyone’s taste. And if there is something you want to do, it is just to propose it and see if anyone else are interested as well.

And then there is the food…OMG…the food. The lunches at the OAC are worth the trip alone. In the evenings we split up and visit different restaurants and tavernas in the area. One of the nights, there is a Cretan evening with local food and local dansers performing. And on Thursday, we had the traditional JCrete barbeque. Only this year, we couldn’t light the grills due to the extreme dry conditions and fire and fire risk. So the solutions became an old Cretan tradition of using the local bakery oven to prepare the meat and grilled vegetables.

Last week, I had the pleasure of being part of the Code the Continuum Hackathon which took place at the University of Gagliari on Sardinia, Italy. The location itself is worth the visit, so I definitely understand the choice of venue. The two-day hackathon was held at the university campus with approximately 50 attendees registered. I had created a challenge where the participants would create a Jakarta EE application that integrated with an LLM to produce an Hourglass Model of a given domain and use case. The task was to give the LLM enough context to produce an accurate model using agentic augmentation techniques.

Five of the 10 teams signed up for the Jakarta EE Hourglass Model challenge out of which four of them finished. The teams were allowed to participate in multiple challenges, so there were some overlap between them. All teams did a fabolus job and it was not an easy task to select the three winners for our challenge. At the end, it boiled down to how well they were using the Jakarta EE APIs and the libraries provided to integrate with the LLM. And, of course, how accurate the generated Hourglass Model was.

The three winning teams were:
🥇 Cache & Release
🥈 AI/AB Users
🥉 Cyber Guys

The winning team, Team Cache & Release, created a generic solution where they incorporated guardrails for the quality of the generated model. They augmented the LLM with Tools using Jakarta EE and LangChain4J and generated a nice visual representation of the resulting Hourglass Model.

Team AI/AB Users got second place for their solution where they used Jakarta EE and MicoProfile in combination with LangChain4J-CDI to implement Tools, RAG and Guardrails for their model generation. They also created a visual representation of the model.

On third place, Team Cyberguys, used CDI Producers in combination with LangChain4J-CDI. They used advanced prompting to assure the quality of the model. They used metrics from a car to analyze and generate an Hourglass Model for the economy and safety of a driver. I discovered this functionality in the rental car I had, so it is definitely a relevant use case for SDV (Software Defined Vehicle).

GeeCON is a wonderful community-oriented conference, and GeeCON 2026 was no exception. The organizers, speakers, and attendees are such a friendly crowd. The size of the conference is fairly constant, maybe a little smaller than last year, but it is hard to gauge since the venue is so right-sized. It is hosted in a cinema complex, so the screens are big and the seats are comfortable. There are three parallel tracks, which means that the talks are pretty well attended. I would estimate that there were between 80 and 100 people attending my talk.

The speaker’s dinner on the first night was excellent! We had a three-course meal at a restaurant in downtown Krakow. The quality of the food was just amazing. Maybe only outdone by the company. It is always nice to be able to share a meal with fellow speakers. At GeeCON, you get to do that every night.

If you haven’t spoken at or attended GeeCON yet, I highly recommend adding it to your list of to-dos for next year.

JavaConnect KE 2026 was the second edition of this conference. It is run by Kenya JUG in the good hands of Ian Dancan and his group of ortanizers. The conference featured a nice mix of local and international speakers where superstar-speaker Venkat Subramaniam and myself represented the international. Jakarta EE were able to help out with the event by sponsoring the food. This is an excellent way to help the local organizers to foster their community.

I did a brand new talk that I have titled Augmenting AI with the Power of Jakarta EE. Being a new talk, the slides were obviously finalized only minutes before entering the stage. This is a very fun talk to give, with lots of demoes to amplify the message. It was very well received by the attendees as well, so it wasn’t only me having fun. I anticipate doing this talk regularly in the coming months. It is already accepted to two upcoming conferences, and I will do it in Javaforum Malmö (Malmö JUG) next week as well.

It was a fantastic energy in the room during the entire event. Each talk was followed by engaged Q&A. I had so many great conversations during the coffee breaks, lunch, and after the event. In addition to my talk, I was also invited to participate in a panel at the closing of the conference. Ian, as the moderator, had prepared relevant questions for all the panelists. Of course, many of them revolving around AI in one form or the other. After the panel, there was a contest where all attendees could participate through Slido. The questions were all linked to what the various presenters had talked about in their presentations. A great way to end the conference!

I finally got around to write about ShiftAPPens 2026. The Hackathon was an amazing experience. Around 150 students came together in a sports hall to participate in this hackathon that over the entire weekend from Friday around lunch until Sunday afternoon.

Since Jakarta EE was a gold sponsor of the hackathon, we could have a challenge of your own. The challenge we proposed was to create a “Know-me-Engine” where the teams should build a Jakarta EE application that interacted with an LLM using augmenting techniques to make the application provide better recommendations. We kept the challenge pretty open to encourage creativity. The motivation we pitched for taking our challenge was that even if they learn other languages and technologies at their university, they will most likely be working with Java, Jakarta EE, and related libraries, frameworks and tools when they start their career after graduation. The World runs on Java, and Jakarta EE is a significant part of that.

In total, seven teams chose to take on our challenge.The teams were composed of one up to four persons. We were pretty curious about what the participating teams would be able to create during the weekend. Would the challenge be to hard? Or too easy? It turned out to be pretty well in the middle. The teams required a minimum of guidance and were able to come up with some pretty cool usages of our technology.

The three judges, Otavio Santana, André Gomes, and myself had a difficult task of selecting the winner when the challenge ended on Sunday. We first narrowed it down to three teams that we asked to give us a 10 minute pitch of their solution. After that, we deliberated a little before unanimously selecting the winning team: VelociGrammers consisting of Carlos Ferreira, Dinis Isaev, António Silva, and Diogo Monteiro.

The VelociGrammers created a Movie A(I)ssistant named Chaplin that used data from your profile on TMDB to add context and relevance to the interaction. It could also directly update your movie ratings from the chat dialogue by providing the TMDB API as tools for the assistant. They used Jakarta EE 11 to create a RESTful Web Services API and interacted with the LLM using Langchain4j-CDI. The UI was developed as a simple HTML page using JavaScript to call the REST services. It all was deployed to WildFly.

The students participating in our challenge said that it was a very fun and creative challenge. And that they were surprised over how easy and powerful developing with Jakarta EE was. This show how important it is to reach out to the learning institutions to make sure that they teach this to students so they can get relevant experience for their future careers.

Open Community eXperience 2026 is a wrap. This is the second time since the rebranding from EclipseCon. It is certainly a different type of conference than EclipseCon used to be. The feeling is that it is slightly less community-oriented and more geared toward industry collaborations, which is is not necessarily a bad thing. It attracts participants from more layers of the organizations than developers alone and opens up for cross-pollination across these layers in addition to between projects resulting in many interesting conversations with people from different areas you’d normally not have. The hallway track at OCX was definitely interesting and proves again why it is important to attend conferences in person. This is something you don’t get at virtual conferences or by watching talks on YouTube.

In 2024, we hosted the Open Community for Java as a so-called co-located event, with two rooms dedicated to Java in a separate building. It certainly gave us the opportunity to fill the agenda with more relevant content for the Java community, but it also made us feel a little as outsiders compared to the “Main OCX Track”. This year, we chose a different approach by being a part of the Main OCX Track. The result was that we ended up with slightly less relevant content for the Java community, and all mixed in with everything else. Due to the date conflict with several other major Java conferences in Europe, the expectations were not very high for the number of attendees from the Java community, so this was probably not entirely a bad decision, even if the ones that did attend had a little less to choose from.

Those present at OCX this year could enjoy great food, great coffee, and great hallway conversations in addition to high-quality talks from excellent speakers. I hope that we will be able to get a bigger presence of both Java in the talks as well as among the attendees next year. At least, the dates for OCX and JCON won’t conflict next year, as the dates for OCX 2027 are April 13-15, while JCON Europe 2027 will be held May 31-June 3.

When Ko offered Jakarta EE a spot in the JUG Square at Voxxed Days Amsterdam 2026 as an Ambassador of the conference, I immediately accepted. With 950 registered attendees and expansion from a one-day to a two-day conference, Voxxed Days Amsterdam is sailing up as one of the biggest and most important conferences in the area. Jakarta EE is proud to support the conference.

I did not have a talk this year, but ended up on the big screen during the Day 2 opening. A photo of Arjan and me talking in the JUG square was used to exemplify the Hallway Track. For those not familiar with the term, the Hallway Track is the informal meetings and discussions that occur in the hallway between the conference rooms. This is an element that you miss out on if you only attend online conferences. In the Hallway Track is where the magic happens. When attendees, speakers, sponsors. volunteers, staff, and organizers meet informally.

I will definitely be back next year, either as a speaker, sponsor, ambassador, or attendee. I’ll even volunteer or join the catering staff if necessary. If Jakarta EE has a booth next year as well, I will make sure that the rollup banner arrives in time for both days. This year, it arrived a day late, so I was only able to use it on Day 2. Not that it mattered much, I had brought all my leftover swag, and none of it came home with me.

If I should pick one conference that has been instrumental in defining my career, it would be JavaOne. I have attended almost all editions of JavaOne since my first time in 1999 including the years it was branded as CodeOne. First as an attendee, later as a speaker. What makes JavaOne special is the quality of the technical content and of course the Community. JavaOne is the plays to meet the Java Community. JavaOne 2026 was the second JavaOne since the restart back in the Bay Area. It is now a smaller more boutique-like conference far from what it used to be in its hay-days in the beginning of the Millennium.

On Friday, the day after the conference, we had one of our two yearly face-to-face meetings in the Java Community Executive Committee.We had a lot of great presentations about what the different members are doing with and for the community. Since the meeting was held at the Oracle campus, it was a natural choice to take the group photo and some selfies in front of the Oracle sponsored Team USA America’s Cup boat outside one of the office buildings.