Empowering Growth: The Art of Harnessing Your Mentor's Expertise as a Senior Developer

As a senior developer, you have likely acquired a wealth of technical knowledge and honed your skills through years of experience. However, even the most seasoned professionals can benefit from the guidance and expertise of a mentor. In fact, harnessing the wisdom of a mentor can be a powerful tool for accelerating your growth and development in the field.

In this session, we will explore the art of empowering your growth as a senior developer by leveraging your mentor's expertise. We will discuss how to find the right mentor, establish effective communication channels, and create a mutually beneficial relationship. Additionally, we will delve into the specific ways in which a mentor can contribute to your professional growth, including expanding your technical knowledge, providing career guidance, and offering invaluable insights based on their own experiences.

A Developer's Search for Meaning: Thriving as AI Transforms Our World

This presentation explores how developers and IT professionals are reconstructing their occupational identity as AI transform our field.

As generative AI increasingly handle tasks we once considered core to our professional identity, many experienced developers face an existential question: "What makes me valuable as a programmer if AI can code?"

Using occupational science concepts as well as drawing inspiration from Viktor Frankl's seminal work, we'll examine three critical phases developers experience: identity construction (actively rebuilding professional self-concept), identity discrepancy (the gap between past and present roles), and identity disruption (acute crisis of professional worth). Through real developer stories and research insights, we'll reveal how those thriving in this transition find meaning not in circumstances, but in their chosen response to change.

This unique collaboration between a software architect and occupational therapist offers both technical depth and humanistic insight. We'll provide practical strategies for evolving from "code writer" to "AI shepherd," transforming existential anxiety into purposeful occupation.

Have been presented at Devoxx BE 2025, https://youtu.be/Jo5mOBRr2b4

From Silent Coder to Respected Leader

"We don't think you're suited to work in a team." That was the feedback from one of my first job interviews. A few decades later I mentor developers and speak at international conferences.

Java went through a similar change. It started inside Sun's closed walls and grew into the open ecosystem we have today, now past its thirtieth year. I started as a silent coder, focused on the work and invisible to everyone around me. This talk puts those two next to each other, because they turn out to be the same story.

You will hear how it actually happened. Why JavaOne 2014 became my turning point. How teaching fitness classes accidentally taught me everything I know about presenting. What the right mentors did for my career, and what I wish I had asked them years earlier.

AI can write your code, review your pull request, and explain a framework you have never touched. It cannot build your reputation, introduce you to the person who changes your career, or tell a room what it felt like to ship the thing. The parts of our work that are hardest to automate are the human ones, and those are the parts most of us have practised the least.

Whether you are an introvert avoiding the spotlight or a team lead who wants to bring others along, you will leave with concrete steps to go from consumer to contributor in the Java community. Technical excellence alone was never enough. It is even less enough now.