Foojay Podcast #93: Update Your JDK, Read More Code, and Talk to Your Users: Interviews From VoxxedDays Amsterdam
A hallway at a Java conference often teaches you more than the talks. People share what broke in production, which JDK version finally pushed them off Java 8, and what tools changed their workflow last month. At VoxxedDays Amsterdam we grabbed fifteen of those conversations on tape with Ko Turk, Johannes Bechberger, Lutske de Leeuw, Aicha Laafia, Marit van Dijk, Adele Carpenter, Patrick Baumgartner, Sohan Maheshwar, Jeroen Egelmeers, Erwin Manders, Alexander Shopov, Maarten Verburg, Arjan Tijms, Joost Kaan, and Stephan Janssen for Foojay Podcast #93.
What we talked about
- Why teams still sit on old JDKs and how to plan the move to a modern version
- New features in Java 25 and Java 26, including stream gatherers and JFR improvements
- AI-assisted coding and the craft of prompt engineering
- Authorization patterns, JWT, and how cryptography shows up in everyday code
- GDPR experiments and what they teach about handling user data
- Container builds with Buildpacks and squeezing size out of images
- Bridging Jakarta EE and Spring in the same project
- Getting started with open-source contributions
- Reading more code to grow as a developer
- The hallway track as the real reason to show up at a conference
What stood out
One theme kept coming back across every interview. Java has grown up quietly, and most teams underestimate how much the language and the platform shifted in the last few releases. Talking to your users, reading other people’s code, and updating your JDK turn out to be three sides of the same habit.
See the Foojay Podcast #93 for all info, shownotes, links, etc.