Software development is rarely as clean as the tutorials make it seem. In the real world, we deal with messy legacy code, unclear requirements, broken pipelines, and surprise outages. This talk shares battle-tested lessons from real Java projects—what went wrong, what we learned, and what actually made things better.

We’ll walk through practical examples of how automation, sensible standards, and lightweight tooling helped teams avoid common pitfalls, improve code quality, and keep their sanity. Topics include auto-generating API clients, enforcing code style without endless debates, catching bugs early with static analysis, and setting up dev environments that just work.

No buzzwords, no silver bullets—just stories from the trenches and the takeaways you can apply to your own projects right now. Whether you're wrangling a monolith, spinning up microservices, or somewhere in between, this session will leave you with a toolbox of practical ideas—and a few laughs along the way.