Shaping the Future of Java, Faster – Donald Smith
There’s just one week to go until our Shaping the Future of Java, Faster meetup on Tuesday 5th March. At the session, Oracle’s Donald Smith will discuss how the Java SE Platform and the JDK have moved to a rapid, six-month release cadence, with the Java 11 release in September 2018 and the next release later in March 2019. He’ll review the motivations for this change and discuss how this impacts users.
Before the event we chatted to Donald to find out a bit more about what to expect from his talk.
Who do you think should come along and why?
Anyone interested in shaping the future of Java and discussing how Java is set for its third decade of growth and evolution.
What do you think are the three most interesting questions that this event will answer?
Exactly how the Java SE release cadence started in 2017 was conceived, how it’s working three releases later, and what it means practically going forward. Why Java has never been more free and open source. Highlights of the exciting innovations in flight for future releases.
Why do you think this presentation is important for people?
Java has enjoyed over twenty years as one of the top software development platforms in the world. But to keep ahead, Java has had to evolve over time to changing application developer needs. This presentation will review some of the changes and challenges facing the Java ecosystem over the past two years and take a look at the future.
Any advice for junior developers entering the industry?
One of the best pieces of career advice I was ever given early on was to be mindful of the entire stack, not just your own layer of it. I’ve since expanded that wisdom to include the fact we should be mindful not only of the software stacks we’re working on, but across the industry as a whole.
Over 12 million developers use Java — and it can be easy to get silo’d into thinking all 12 million are programming exactly like me. The incredible diversity of the Java ecosystem is something that’s underappreciated yet very high value. I always encourage developers of all kinds to try to get out and see other parts of the ecosystem they may not even know exist!
If you’d like to join Donald and the LJC to discuss the future of Java you can reserve your space on our event page.