LLMs have made remarkable progress, which might suggest they’re the answer to everything. However, when it comes to everyday tasks like creating work schedules they tend to fall short. As a result, humans often end up creating a schedule manually, which is usually far from optimal.

Fortunately, there’s a lesser-known branch of AI that excels at complex scheduling. In this talk, we’ll discuss Timefold, a Java based open-source AI solver, and you’ll discover how it leverages magic (aka math) to generate optimized schedules.

Every Christmas Eve, Santa faces a monumental challenge: delivering gifts to millions of children around the world in just one night. There’s no time for detours, and a well-crafted plan is essential!

In this talk, we’ll help Santa find the optimal travel route for his journey using Timefold, an open-source AI solver. By setting up some basic domain classes, you’ll be able to tackle vehicle routing problems without getting lost in the magic (aka math). Through a series of live demos, you’ll see practical examples in action and leave with a powerful new tool in your problem-solving toolbox.

So join in and let’s use our favorite programming language to make sure everyone gets their presents under the Christmas tree!

‘Change is the only constant in our industry’… but they never told us it would go this fast. With the recent evolutions in AI, ‘change’ has shifted from a ‘constant’ to something better described as ’exponential,’ sparking excitement for some and existential dread for others.

In this session, we’ll discuss some insights into dealing with change gathered from experts in the field. We’ll explore the emotional aspects of change, contextualize our relation to change and discuss skills and strategies to deal with evolving landscapes.

After leaving this session, you’ll be better prepared for whatever change might come on your path. And with preparation comes bravery.

Do you also feel like it’s hard to keep up with all the new tools and frameworks coming your way? You are not alone! By choosing IT, you are choosing to learn for the rest of your life… not an easy task.

In this session we’ll look into some concepts that will help you get the most out of your efforts to learn new shiny stuff!

We’ll go over a couple of example projects and give you some tools to keep learning without being overwhelmed by the flood of new technologies.

There comes a time in any project when you feel you are completely ‘done’ with it. Either you’ve learned all you can, the software is in production or you are completely fed up with the project or team and ask for a transfer.

Whatever the reason for leaving, every line of code you wrote and every interaction you had will have a lasting impact on whoever needs to take over the reigns. How successful your successors will be is in no small part in your hands.

This talk is about taking responsibility for what you leave behind. You leave this session with some guidance on how to leave a legacy which isn’t despised and hated but instead is a solid foundation for future development.

As a developer, you’ve been getting dependencies and applications from places like Maven Central, Homebrew and Chocolatey. Have you ever wondered how you can add your own creations to those packagers and repositories? Wouldn’t that be cool?!? Anyone worldwide being able to install your CLI or use your library with the tools they already use?

In this talk, we’ll show you just how fast and easy it can be to do just that! We’ll show you practical examples, like sharing a CLI app through Homebrew or publishing your library on Maven Central while announcing it on social media, all using JReleaser! After this talk, you’ll have learned exactly what this free Open Source tool has to offer and you’ll know why we are so excited to tell you about it!

So strap on your jetpack and join us as we show you how to package, publish, release and announce your creations at the speed of light!

Unit Tests by themselves give no guarantee that your system will work in a production environment. That’s where your code will have to work together with other resources like databases and APIs. Unfortunately, those are the kind of dependencies we try to avoid in tests by using mocking-frameworks. Risky business, because this means we’ll only know if the application really works when you push it to production.

In this session we’ll look at some strategies you can use to test your application without mocking your dependencies away. You’ll discover how tools like Liquibase, TestContainers, WireMock and Spring Cloud Contract can immensely improve your tests so you can deploy your application to production AND sleep at night.

The Netflix Open Source Software Center is a collection of Open-Source tools and libraries developed by Netflix to help them build the system they need to bring video stream to millions of users worldwide . In this presentation we will have a look at some of these libraries and discover how they solve problems that will occur when splitting your system into hundreds of microservices.

Even if you do not adopt microservices, the OSS-tools discussed in this session can help you to make your software more resilient than it is today.