Foojay Podcast #94: More Than a Blog: How Foojay Connects, Sustains, and Evolves the Java Community

Author: Annelore Egger

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Foojay.io, the website for the Friends of OpenJDK, is turning six years old. To celebrate, Frank Delporte headed to JCON in Cologne, Germany, and sat down with twelve members of the Java community to talk about what Foojay means to them, what they learn from each other, and how the community is evolving.

This episode covers a lot of ground. Sharat Chandar reflects on 25 years in the Java community and why the people are what keep the language alive. Markus Westergren and Iryna Dohndorf both focus on a theme that comes up again and again: developer sustainability. Not just green software, but how you stay healthy, grounded, and relevant when AI is changing everything around you. Markus and his wife researched how developers are reacting to AI, from ignoring it completely to transforming everything they do. Iryna talks about building resilience and robustness as skills, not afterthoughts.

René Schwietzke dives deep into JIT compilation and his work on the 1 billion row challenge, writing fast pure Java code without reaching for unsafe methods. Gerrit Grunwald explains the Disco API, the tool behind SDKMAN, Gradle, and more, which tracks every OpenJDK distribution available, including ones you have probably never heard of from Asia. Catherine Edelveis walks through why choosing the right OpenJDK distribution matters and how reducing Docker image sizes improves both security and performance. Jago de Vreede built a JavaFX UI for SDKMAN and talks about what he keeps learning from the community.

Annelore Egger mentors people who think they do not know enough to speak at conferences. Spoiler: they do. Buhake Sindi brings Jakarta EE into the AI agent world with LangChain4J CDI and a talk on agent-to-agent protocols. François Martin just published a fresh Foojay article on flaky tests and shares what writing and mentoring have taught him about open source. Dominika Tasarz-Sochacka, Frank’s new Foojay colleague, shares her vision for growing the community and making it even more welcoming. And Geertjan Wielenga, who started Foojay six years ago, joins remotely from under a lighthouse in Ireland to look back and look forward.

Foojay is more than a blog. It is a Mastodon server, a Slack community, the Disco API, a book on sustainability, a podcast, and now an education catalog. Six years in, it is still growing, still community-driven, and still very much a place where anyone who works with Java is welcome.

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Content

00:00 Introduction

02:16 Sharat Chandar

05:37 Markus Westergren

09:46 Iryna Dohndorf

13:59 René Schwietzke

18:28 Gerrit Grunwald

27:45 Catherine Edelveis

31:16 Jago de Vreede

35:05 Annelore Egger

38:03 Buhake Sindi

44:03 François Martin

48:18 Dominika Tasarz-Sochacka

51:18 Geertjan Wielenga

58:15 Conclusion

The post Foojay Podcast #94: More Than a Blog: How Foojay Connects, Sustains, and Evolves the Java Community appeared first on foojay.