Susanne Pieterse
Software Architect & Senior Software Engineer at OPEN.nl software group
Amersfoort, The Netherlands
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Susanne is an auto-didact full-stack software engineer and iSAQB certified software architect. Passionate about creating innovative solutions and sharing knowledge. Loves tea and a heavy bag boxing workout.
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Topics
Back to the Future: Building a RAG-Powered VR Time Machine
Imagine stepping into the streets of Utrecht in the 1500s. Now imagine having an all-knowing guide who can answer any question about the monuments around you.
We built a browser based VR application that gives users a 360-degree historical view of Utrecht on their phone or in a VR headset, where they can ask questions about the monuments around them. The answers are generated using Retrieval Augmented Generation, combining spatial context from the 3D environment with historical texts written by archaeologists.
In this session we will show how we built this time machine using Spring Boot, Ollama, Docling, LangChain4J, React, Typescript, cloud based LLM and LangChainJS. More importantly, we share what we learned while building the RAG pipeline: extracting text from archaeological reports, chunking sources in meaningful ways, improving retrieval quality, preventing hallucinations, and engineering context-aware prompts in the frontend.
The session concludes with a live demonstration of the application, taking us back to Utrecht in 1528 and the following centuries.
Your Data, Your Rules: Tailoring application metrics with Micrometer
Are you tired of relying on generic metrics? Do your stakeholders ask for hard figures of application usage? Would you like to discover usage trends to predict the need for scaling? Imagine having the freedom to measure exactly what matters most to your business, making data-driven decisions with confidence. Welcome to the world of custom metrics with Micrometer and Spring Boot Actuator.
In this talk, I uncover the potential of custom metrics. With custom metrics, you break free from the constraints of pre-defined measurements and gain the power to capture precisely what's relevant to your application. Get ready to apply a data arsenal tailored to your specific goals.
I’ll show you how to create the right kind of metric fitting your needs. I’ll also demonstrate how to use Spring Boot Actuator, Prometheus and Grafana to visualize these metrics. By the end of my talk, you’ll know how to impress your manager and stakeholders with a dashboard that provides them concrete evidence to support their proposals, ultimately streamlining operations and maximizing results.
RAG in the Wild: Real-World Lessons from Modernizing Legacy Systems
Enterprise and government document systems hold terabytes of valuable unstructured information, yet most still rely on keyword and metadata search with little semantic context. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) promises a breakthrough, but tutorials rarely prepare you for regulated, large-scale environments.
In this talk, I’ll share lessons from building a RAG stack with Spring Boot, Elasticsearch, LangChain4j, Docker, and ActiveMQ, using both Azure OpenAI and Ollama. Expect concrete insights on document chunking, enforcing access control, and keeping LLMs grounded in facts — practical takeaways for anyone bringing RAG from demo to production.
J-Spring 2026 Sessionize Event
UtrechtJUG meetup
RAG in the Wild: Real-World Lessons from Modernizing Legacy Systems
DevOpsCon & MLCon 2026 Sessionize Event
VoxxedDays Amsterdam
RAG in the Wild: Real-World Lessons from Modernizing Legacy Systems
SF Java User Group
RAG in the Wild: Real-World Lessons from Modernizing Legacy Systems
JavaOne 2026
RAG in the Wild: Real-World Lessons from Modernizing Legacy Systems
Vierde Vrijdag tech meetup
RAG in the Wild: Real-World Lessons from Modernizing Legacy Systems
AmsterdamJUG
RAG in the Wild: Real-World Lessons from Modernizing Legacy Systems
J-Fall 2023 Sessionize Event
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