Accelerating Maven Builds: From Snail's Pace 🐌 to Rocket Speed 🚀

Are you tired of watching Maven builds crawl at a snail's pace, wasting precious development time? Spending too much time at the coffee machine, or fighting battles with wooden swords under the excuse "my code's compiling"?

Join us to learn how to supercharge your Maven build! We'll cover three main mechanisms that you can apply in your project. Learn how each speeds up your build, when they provide the biggest gains, and what pitfalls await.

So take the next step in boosting your developer productivity by learning practical tips to decrease context switching and increase development speed and feedback cycle. Your journey from snail's pace to rocket speed begins today!

In this talk I'll show how to structurally improve the build speed for projects that use Apache Maven. I'll show how to detect bottlenecks, how to translate that into actionable improvements. Of course I'll explain the what and the how, so the audience knows when a certain change may be beneficial or not.

SSL/TLS for Mortals

Using SSL/TLS the right way is often a big hurdle for developers. We prefer to have that one colleague perform “something with certificates”, because he/she knows how that works. But what if “that one colleague” is enjoying vacation and something goes wrong with the certificates?

In this session we'll take a close look at secure communication at the transport level. Starting with what exactly SSL and TLS is, we'll dive into public/private keys, and signing. We'll also learn what all this has to do with an unfortunate Dutch notary. Of course, there'll be plenty of practical tips & trics, as well as demo's.

Attend this session to become “that one colleague”!

What's Cooking in Maven?

It’s been over 10 years since Maven 3 saw the light, bringing initial multi-module support. Later releases brought a lot of improvements, bug fixes, and of course coloured output.

But the Maven community hasn’t been resting on their laurels. A lot of effort has gone into the future of Maven. You may have heard about Maven 4, Maven Wrapper, or Maven Daemon. Why should you care? And how will it change the way you use Maven? I will show you by using the latest snapshot builds of Maven - time will tell if that’s a brave or a stupid idea…

Join me to find out what the future of Maven has for you!

[Your Title Here]

Yes, you’ve read that correctly - this talk and this stage could’ve been yours. You're wondering how to make that happen? I'll take you to the wonderful world of "call for papers", "abstracts" and acceptance processes.

You might have reasons why you think you’re not up to this. But let’s see whether those excuses are genuine or if we can eliminate them.

So, next year, see you on stage?!

I want to encourage people who have the ambition to share their stories on stage. As much as I care about that, I cannot attend your event only to deliver this short talk. I would be happy to deliver this talk in addition to one of my other submissions to your event.

Delivered at
* Devoxx PL 2025

Why I am not afraid AI will take my job

Large language models (LLMs) are here to stay. So is their impact on many professions. Our work in IT is no exception to that rule. Some doomsayers predict that such models will soon make large parts of our work redundant.

So, is it time to start queuing up in the unemployment line? I don't think so! To understand why, I will explain how an LLM works behind the facade of the prompt window. Once we understand what an LLM essentially is, we will better understand the threats and the opportunities for our work.

Join me to get a better understanding of the inner workings of an LLM. As a bonus, you will leave the room with a much more optimistic view of what their impact on your work can be.

This talk is mainly targeted at developers. The story is equally relevant for other professions in IT, such as architects, testers or system operators.