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.
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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
Jfokus 2025 Sessionize Event Upcoming
JChampions Conference 2025 Sessionize Event Upcoming
Montreal Java User Group Upcoming
- Test-Driven Development: It's easier than you think!
- Quarkus Compare and Contrast
Ottawa Java User Group Upcoming
- Test-Driven Development: It's easier than you think!
- Quarkus Compare and Contrast
Boston Java Users ACM Chapter
Test-Driven Development: It's easier than you think!
Utrecht Java User Group
Quarkus for Spring Developers
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
Quarkus Club Webinar
Quarkus for Spring Developers
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/aLwIF1dg30Q
NoFluffJustStuff Webinar
Quarkus Compare & Contrast
Recording: https://nofluffjuststuff.com/webinar/114/quarkus_compare_contrast
IBM TechCon 2024
Refactoring to Kube-native Java with Quarkus
San Francisco Java Users Group
How to avoid common pitfalls with modern microservices testing
Recording: https://youtu.be/TJK4_wEbwJ8
Boston Java Users ACM Chapter
How to avoid common pitfalls with modern microservices testing
JavaZone 2023
Quarkus for Spring Developers
Recording: https://vimeo.com/862003843
RivieraDev 2023
- Quarkus Deep Dive Workshop
- Quarkus for Spring Developers
- Avoiding common pitfalls with modern microservices testing
DevBcn 2023 Sessionize Event
Pittsburgh Java Meetup Group
Use Quarkus Funqy to deploy Java Serverless functions to multiple clouds
Recording: https://youtu.be/2q-NGCkotpI
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
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
Boston Java Meetup Group
Hands-on workshop: Spring Boot microservices to Quarkus with little-to-no code changes
DevNexus 2023
Quarkus for Spring Developers
Recording: https://youtu.be/Zrsg2Tt60rw
Avoiding common pitfalls with modern microservices testing
Recording: https://youtu.be/pvsl-Y5d4KU
Dublin Java User Group
Quarkus for Spring developers deep dive
Boston Java Users ACM Chapter
Quarkus for Spring Developers
San Francisco Java Users Group
Microservices with Quarkus
Silicon Brighton Java User Group
Quarkus for Spring Developers
Recording: https://youtu.be/4HqRv45fEps
Cleveland Java Users Group
Quarkus World Tour
Devoxx Belgium 2022
How to avoid common pitfalls with modern microservices testing
Recording: https://youtu.be/vYwkDPrzqV8
J4K
Quarkus for Spring Developers
Recording: https://youtu.be/sfLhshPGW4A
How about some tests with your applications?
Recording: https://youtu.be/dbnXkJnIVl8
JCON 2022 ONLINE (virtual) Sessionize Event
Code PaLOUsa 2022 Sessionize Event
THAT Conference Texas
Reactive Apps with Quarkus + Responsive Data with Cassandra = Developer Nirvana!
Microsoft JDConf 2022 Sessionize Event
Eric Deandrea
Java Champion & Senior Principal Developer Advocate, Red Hat
Manchester, New Hampshire, United States
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