Speaker

Eric Deandrea

Eric Deandrea

Java Champion & Senior Principal Developer Advocate, Red Hat

Manchester, New Hampshire, United States

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Eric Deandrea is a Java Champion & Senior Principal Developer Advocate at Red Hat, focusing on application development technologies. Eric has over 25 years of experience designing and building Java-based solutions and developer training programs. He is a contributor to various OSS projects, including Quarkus, Spring, LangChain4j, WireMock, and Microcks, as well as a speaker at many public events and user groups around the world. Eric recently put his Quarkus and Spring knowledge to use by publishing his first book, “Quarkus for Spring Developers (https://red.ht/quarkus-spring-devs).” Outside of work, Eric enjoys boating on the lakes of New Hampshire, ice hockey, and martial arts, in which he holds a black belt in Kempo Karate.

Awards

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • quarkus
  • java
  • Spring
  • Spring Boot
  • Spring Cloud
  • Spring Framework
  • Spring Security
  • Spring Data JPA
  • Core Java / Java SE
  • Java and Server-side
  • Java language
  • Microservice Architecture
  • WireMock
  • Microcks
  • LangChain4j
  • open source
  • Kotlin

Java meets AI: Build LLM-Powered Apps with LangChain4j

Join us for a guided tour through the possibilities of the LangChain4j framework! Chat with virtually any LLM provider (OpenAI, Gemini, HuggingFace, Azure, AWS, ...)? Generate AI images straight from your Java application with Dall-E and Gemini? Have LLMs return POJOs? Interact with local models on your machine? LangChain4j makes it a piece of cake! We will explain the fundamental building blocks of LLM-powered applications, show you how to chain them together into AI Services, and how to interact with your knowledge base using advanced RAG.

Then, we take a deeper dive into the Quarkus LangChain4j integration. We'll show how little code is needed when using Quarkus, how live reload makes experimenting with prompts a breeze and finally, we'll look at its native image generation capabilities, aiming to get your AI-powered app deployment-ready in no time.

By the end of this session, you will have all the technical knowledge to get your hands dirty, along with plenty of inspiration for designing the apps of the future.

RAG & Tools for developers with LangChain4j

Are you utterly confused about RAG, what it is, how it works, and what things you need to consider when doing it? I know I was when I started learning about it!

If you feel the same, join me as I take a technology-agnostic walk through exactly what RAG is and then demonstrate various Java implementations using LangChain4j.

Then I will look at tools and agents and break that down as well, explaining everything from a technology-agnostic point of view, then demonstrating various implementations using LangChain4j.

Tackling Inner Loop Development for Distributed Systems

You’ve all been there, haven’t you? You are developing an application that needs to connect to something else in order to function properly, yet you can’t (or don’t want to) run that “something else” on your local developer laptop. What are some of the tools and technologies that could help in this situation?

Microservices and distributed systems in general are often deployed on a cloud platform such as Kubernetes, which orchestrates the deployment and management of containerized applications. Microservices, however, don't exist in a vacuum. They typically communicate with other services, such as databases, message brokers, or other microservices. This distributedness makes it hard for you to do local/inner-loop development and testing efficiently.

In this talk, you will learn about some potential solutions you can use to help tackle some of these challenges by either running services locally in a more efficient way or by interacting with external dependencies/systems remotely.

You should come away from this session with some new ideas on how to work with distributed applications using technologies such as Docker Compose, TestContainers, Quarkus Dev Services, Remote Development, Skupper, and Eclipse JKube.

Practical AI Lab for Enterprise Java Developers: From Zero to Hero

This hands-on workshop is designed to equip enterprise Java developers with the essential skills and knowledge needed to harness the power of artificial intelligence in their projects. Participants will embark on a journey from novice to AI expert, learning how to effectively leverage prompts, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), state-of-the-art tools, embedding techniques, and robust model testing practices.

To solidify their understanding, attendees will participate in a series of hands-on exercises, including building and testing AI models, experimenting with different prompting techniques, and exploring the capabilities of various AI tools. The workshop will also introduce the Backstage software template, a powerful platform for managing and scaling AI projects within enterprise environments. By the end of this workshop, participants will be well-equipped to leverage AI to solve complex business problems and drive innovation within their organizations.

Quarkus for Spring Developers

In this session, I will show concepts and conventions familiar to Spring developers and how those same concepts and conventions can be implemented in Quarkus, all while highlighting similarities and differences between them. Additionally, I will show similarities and differences in how testing is done, highlighting Quarkus Dev Services.

This session will be mostly live coding while minimizing the amount of slides. I will introduce an existing Spring application with a full test suite and build a Quarkus equivalent version of it, live.

Test-Driven Development: It's easier than you think!

Everyone loves writing tests, don’t they? How do you write good tests? What tools are available for you to write good tests?

In this session, I will dive into the many features of Quarkus that help developers write good tests. I will highlight some of the features of Quarkus, Dev Services and Continuous Testing, which help make testing easier. Additionally, I will live code some tests for common use cases developers encounter, including unit, integration, and “black box” testing of imperative and reactive RESTful and event-driven applications that use common services, such as databases and Kafka brokers. I will discuss techniques such as mocking, spying, and interaction-based testing/verification.

I'll even spend some time showing how IDE-based AI assistants can help!

Once you see how easy TDD really can be there isn't a reason to not do it!

How to avoid common pitfalls with modern microservices testing

Have you ever wondered why your microservices break in production after all the tests have passed during CI/CD? Have you ever wondered if you’re testing too much or too little? If you want to learn about common pitfalls and how to catch them at build time rather than at runtime, this session is for you!

In this session, we’ll share some common battle scars from our experiences in the field. Additionally, we will introduce the testing pyramid and explain why it is important in helping to continuously deploy microservices independently without fear. We will demonstrate, through a test-driven development approach, how the combination of Pact contract testing combined with Quarkus developer joy can help prevent your microservices from breaking in production

Non-deterministic? No problem! You can test it!

Testing is hard, which is why developers tend to avoid it. Testing non-deterministic things is even harder, which is unfortunate, since we're all writing AI-infused applications, and AI models are notoriously non-deterministic. What happens when the applications start using advanced features, such as RAG, tools, and agents? How do you test these applications? There must be some tools, technologies, and practices out there that can help, while not costing your organization lots of money!

Join Java Champions Oleg & Eric in this session as they explore some of these tools & technologies, such as Testcontainers, LangChain4j, Quarkus, and Ollama. They’ll bring together Oleg’s Testcontainers knowledge and Eric’s testing obsessions, getting hands-on and show how you can incorporate these tools and technologies into your inner and outer loop processes.

You’ll see how effortlessly Quarkus integrates with Testcontainers, and how Testcontainers can be used in conjunction with popular LLMs when writing tests. You’ll also learn about how to use containers to extend your testing into your CI environments, so you can always be sure that if your tests are green you’re good to go!

Microservice Superheroes to the rescue!

Are you a developer building microservices? Do you struggle with how to develop and test individual microservices that are part of a larger system? Do you want to learn about building REST-based, event-driven, and AI-powered applications?

In this session, I will introduce the Quarkus Superheroes application and demonstrate how the application can facilitate local development within a microservices architecture. I will show how individual applications within the system can be tested (both unit and integration testing), as well as how “upstream” applications can be developed and tested in isolation of their “downstream” dependencies. Additionally, I will demonstrate how the application can be easily deployed to a remote Kubernetes environment and assist in the local development of individual applications within the overall system.

The Quarkus Superheroes application is a sample application consisting of several microservices demonstrating Quarkus features and best practices. The application allows superheroes to fight against supervillains. The application consists of several microservices, communicating either synchronously via REST or event-driven via Apache Kafka, all with a web-based user interface. Some of the applications are reactive while others are more traditional, showcasing how to build each kind. There’s even ChatGPT and Dall-e integration!

Devnexus 2025 Sessionize Event Upcoming

March 2025 Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Jfokus 2025 Sessionize Event Upcoming

February 2025 Stockholm, Sweden

JChampions Conference 2025 Sessionize Event Upcoming

January 2025

Montreal Java User Group Upcoming

- Test-Driven Development: It's easier than you think!
- Quarkus Compare and Contrast

January 2025 Montréal, Canada

Ottawa Java User Group Upcoming

January 2025 Ottawa, Canada

Boston Java Users ACM Chapter

Test-Driven Development: It's easier than you think!

November 2024 Burlington, Massachusetts, United States

Utrecht Java User Group

Quarkus for Spring Developers

October 2024 Utrecht, The Netherlands

Devoxx Belgium 2024

- Hands-on Lab: Create AI-Infused Apps with LangChain4j: Insights from the Quarkus Developers
- Deep dive: Java meets AI: Build LLM-Powered Apps with LangChain4j
Recording: https://youtu.be/jzuP6l54kWA

October 2024 Antwerpen, Belgium

Quarkus Club Webinar

Quarkus for Spring Developers

July 2024

NoFluffJustStuff Webinar

Quarkus Compare & Contrast

July 2024

IBM TechCon 2024

Refactoring to Kube-native Java with Quarkus

March 2024

San Francisco Java Users Group

How to avoid common pitfalls with modern microservices testing
Recording: https://youtu.be/TJK4_wEbwJ8

February 2024 San Francisco, California, United States

Boston Java Users ACM Chapter

How to avoid common pitfalls with modern microservices testing

September 2023 Burlington, Massachusetts, United States

JavaZone 2023

Quarkus for Spring Developers
Recording: https://vimeo.com/862003843

September 2023 Oslo, Norway

RivieraDev 2023

- Quarkus Deep Dive Workshop
- Quarkus for Spring Developers
- Avoiding common pitfalls with modern microservices testing

July 2023 Valbonne, France

DevBcn 2023 Sessionize Event

July 2023 L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Spain

Pittsburgh Java Meetup Group

Use Quarkus Funqy to deploy Java Serverless functions to multiple clouds
Recording: https://youtu.be/2q-NGCkotpI

June 2023

Red Hat Summit

Lightning talk - Quarkus for Spring Developers
Workshop: Modern Application Development
Workshop: Accelerate new Application Development
Workshop: Building a Message Hub with Apache Camel

May 2023 Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Devoxx UK 2023

Quarkus for Spring Developers
Recording: https://youtu.be/z8-sXMZ6pjE

How to avoid common pitfalls with modern microservices testing
Recording: https://youtu.be/CQcbGcWFW3Q

May 2023 London, United Kingdom

Boston Java Meetup Group

Hands-on workshop: Spring Boot microservices to Quarkus with little-to-no code changes

April 2023 Boston, Massachusetts, United States

DevNexus 2023

Quarkus for Spring Developers
Recording: https://youtu.be/Zrsg2Tt60rw

Avoiding common pitfalls with modern microservices testing
Recording: https://youtu.be/pvsl-Y5d4KU

April 2023 Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Dublin Java User Group

Quarkus for Spring developers deep dive

February 2023 Dublin, Ireland

Boston Java Users ACM Chapter

Quarkus for Spring Developers

January 2023 Burlington, Massachusetts, United States

San Francisco Java Users Group

Microservices with Quarkus

December 2022 San Francisco, California, United States

Silicon Brighton Java User Group

Quarkus for Spring Developers
Recording: https://youtu.be/4HqRv45fEps

November 2022 Brighton, United Kingdom

Cleveland Java Users Group

Quarkus World Tour

October 2022 Cleveland, Ohio, United States

Devoxx Belgium 2022

How to avoid common pitfalls with modern microservices testing
Recording: https://youtu.be/vYwkDPrzqV8

October 2022 Antwerpen, Belgium

J4K

Quarkus for Spring Developers
Recording: https://youtu.be/sfLhshPGW4A

How about some tests with your applications?
Recording: https://youtu.be/dbnXkJnIVl8

September 2022

JCON 2022 ONLINE (virtual) Sessionize Event

September 2022

Code PaLOUsa 2022 Sessionize Event

August 2022 Louisville, Kentucky, United States

THAT Conference Texas

Reactive Apps with Quarkus + Responsive Data with Cassandra = Developer Nirvana!

May 2022 Round Rock, Texas, United States

Microsoft JDConf 2022 Sessionize Event

May 2022

Eric Deandrea

Java Champion & Senior Principal Developer Advocate, Red Hat

Manchester, New Hampshire, United States

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