Frank Delporte

I write about Java in places people don’t always expect it, on the Raspberry Pi, driving GPIO pins, rendering JavaFX UIs, and running on RISC-V single-board computers. By day, I’m Senior Technical Writer at Azul. By night, I maintain open-source libraries and build side projects.

This site collects everything in one place: blog posts, conference talks, podcast appearances, videos, and the book I wrote to help other developers get started.

What You’ll Find Here

• Java on Single-Board Computers : Running and benchmarking Java on Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, BeagleBoard, LattePanda, and RISC-V boards. Practical guides, performance tests, and architecture comparisons.
• JavaFX : Desktop UI development with JavaFX: tutorials, library showcases, interviews with JavaFX developers, and the monthly JavaFX Links of the Month roundup.
• Pi4J : The open-source Java I/O library for Raspberry Pi. News, releases, tutorials, and updates from the project I help maintain.
• JVM & Java Performance : Articles on JVM internals, CRaC, the Falcon compiler, hsdis, Java release cycles, and Azul tooling.
• Foojay Podcast : I host and produce the podcast for foojay.io , the community platform for Friends of OpenJDK. 90+ episodes with Java developers, library authors, and community leaders.
• Open Source : Project news, releases, and community updates from Pi4J , Lottie4J , and other projects I contribute to.
• And much more!

Career

I started programming at 10 on a Commodore 64 — using BASIC to control my Lego trains through a relays board. The Commodore Amiga drew me into multimedia, which led me to film and electronics school, television work, and eventually back to programming when customers needed their video on CD-ROMs, DVDs, and the internet.

My professional journey covers roles as a self-employed CMS developer, web developer, ten years at Televic Rail (where I fell in love with Java), and technical lead at Eeve . Since June 2022, I’m a Technical Writer at Azul , the world’s only company focused solely on Java — writing documentation and blog posts about JVM performance, Java tooling, and the broader Java ecosystem.

Achievements

In March 2023, I became a Java Champion — selected by fellow Champions for my contributions to the Java community through articles , books , teaching , videos , conference talks , and open-source work on Pi4J .

In January 2024, I was nominated as a Vaadin Champion for my contributions to the Java UI ecosystem and the broader open-source community.

Inspiring the Next Generation

Since January 2014, I’ve been lead coach of the CoderDojo Belgium club in Ieper, where we teach children aged 7–18 to program using Scratch, Arduino, Minecraft, and Mindstorms. Getting kids excited about writing code that controls something real — a blinking LED, a moving robot, a simple game — is still one of the most satisfying things I do.

Through conference talks and writing across multiple platforms , I try to inspire the next generation of developers to learn, build, and have fun doing it.

Work with me

You can hire me for technical writing, small coding projects, or presentations through my company CodeWriter bv .

Support my work

Everything on this site is free to read and the open-source libraries are free to use. If something here helped you out and you’d like to chip in, you can ☕Buy me a coffee on Ko-fi. Every cup is appreciated and keeps the side projects moving forward.

Read more

• 📖 Interview by Bazlur Rahman
• 🎥 Video interview by Rafael del Nero
• 😄 The roasted version of my bio