TEE: Teki Editorial Everywhere

Yesterday I was so delighted to attend JManc 2026, hosted at AutoTrader's fantastic new office at No. 3 Circle Square . I started the day with breakfast on the rooftop alongside Lorenzo and Bruce. We had great conversations, enjoyed the beautiful views over Manchester, and it was the perfect way to begin an inspiring day. Keynote The event opened with an inspiring keynote by Clare Sudbery , " The Power of Craft : Staying in the Driver's Seat of AI-Assisted Development" She focused on how software engineers should work with AI while continuing to apply professional judgement and craftsmanship. One statement particularly resonated with me: AI has a planetary brain, but it lacks real-world wisdom. LLMs have effectively absorbed an enormous amount of human knowledge. They can perform many tasks remarkably well, especially when given the right prompts. However, real wisdom comes from experience and context, something today's AI still cannot truly possess or connect to...

I was excited to attend the event Accelerate AI with Cloud Run , organised by Google Developer Group (GDG) North West. Unlike the typical seminar-style tech meetups, this event was so different. It wasn't just about listening, it was about building. The combination of an expert talk and hands-on labs felt perfect for a developer audience. The workshop started with a session delivered by Richard Bannister from Google. His talk focused on building AI agents on Google Cloud using the Agent Developer Kit (ADK), which is a framework designed to help developers create, deploy, and scale AI-driven agents efficiently. Key takeaways from the session: A structured architecture for agent development includes: Agent Build:  Capabilities to design, build and test individual AI agents and multi-agent systems Agent Ops: Capabilities to deploy, manage, evolve and optimise AI agents Data Platforms for Agents: Capabilities to acquire, prepare, store and access data for AI agents Security for Agent...

I had the opportunity to attend JManc again this year—and once more, it was fabulous. The sessions were organic, deeply technical, and full of insights shared by developers across different domains. Here's my wrap-up from the day, highlighting a few memorable sessions and conversations. 1 Tony Wilson, Manchester 30 Years of Java — Jim Gough’s Retrospective Jim Gough delivered a fantastic keynote on the evolution of Java over three decades. As a Java Champion, his perspective mixed historical insight with a touch of humor and lived experience. Here are some of the milestones he covered: Applets & Early UI: Java’s original fame came from applets—tiny applications that ran inside web browsers.  AWT & Swing: Early GUI development in Java involved the AWT toolkit, later replaced by the more versatile Swing. JavaFX: The modern Java UI framework that succeeded Swing. It was eventually removed from the JDK and spun out as an open-source project. While less commonly used in modern ...

My Sharing about JavaFX Attending JManc , an unconference organised by Manchester Java Community and hosted at Auto Trader 's offices, was an exciting experience. This unique event demonstrating the essence of participant-driven learning and collaboration, set the stage for a series of engaging and enlightening sessions. Propose and vote for topics In the morning, we proposed topics using sticky notes. Afterward, we voted on these topics with dots, shaping the day's agenda based on collective interest. This process itself was a testament to the community's diverse interests and expertise. Breakfast Keynote by Helen Scott Keynote by Helen Scott The unconference kicked off with a keynote by Helen Scott from JetBrains . Helen's talk centered on AI, a topic so crucial and timely that, as she humorously noted, audience would have thrown her out of the window if she did not speak of AI. Her insights into AI's impact on development and the future of programming set a tho...

Just experienced a fantastic moment at the deep-dive live coding session hosted by Matias Salerno at Auto Trader UK this evening. We were watching the live transformation of imperative legacy Java code into a concise and declarative Functional Programming style. Another interesting thing is how participants with background of JS and Python grasped more OOP concepts in Java during the session.  Matias Salerno (right) Kudos to Manchester Java Community for organising such a hands-on session, and not to mention, the delicious refreshments!

Coding Dojo Thank you to Codurance for organising Coding Dojo to learn Test Driven Development . We did not only taste TDD and JS but also explored Copilot , Team Collaboration, Project Management, Methodology, etc. Networking seemed endless after the talk. No wonder why this city became a hub of talents.  Outside Department Bonded Warehouse Inside Department Bonded Warehouse

Manchester Java Community hosted another great session in Thoughtworks . The speaker is Trisha Gee , co-author of the renowned book Head First Java .  The speaker pointed out that the productivity of developers did not mainly come from individual developer themselves but from the organisation which offers productive environments or not. The factor includes work space size, quietness, privateness, any diversion or needless interruption. On technology side, productivity can be improved by consistency and reliability of builds. Very fast feedback can improve productivity and quality, thus increase revenue, reduce cost and improve brand. References: DEVELOPER PRODUCTIVITY ENGINEERING: WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME? The 2019 Tidelift managed open source survey results Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams Software Productivity   The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement Improve the Performance of Gradle Builds CI fanout Netflix Pursues Soft DevEx Goals with Hard DevProd Metrics using Te...

I joined a meetup brought by Manchester Java Community at Roku 's office. The topic is  Be a better Java developer, learn faster and get more results! The speech started with the dynamic trios: Fire your neurons: learn by doing Force to practise Frequent action The captivating speaker also shared back stories of recruitment and his own secret of Reputation Formula, i.e., Career Reputation = (Focus * Visibility * Action * Skill [XP] * Giver * Responsibility * Consistency) / ((Me-me-me) * Lies^2 * Difficult) In Q&A session, we delved into burning questions like the future of AI in developer jobs and whether Java will be the next COBOL.  Thank you very much to  Bruno Souza for his fascinating speech and inspirational career advice.

Manchester Java Community hosted a meetup with a fantastic speaker Matt Raible in Infinity Works 's office. Matt compared the startup performance and memory usage of Spring Boot , Micronaut , Quarkus and Helidon frameworks. He built a REST API application secured by OAuth 2.0 and ran the application in Docker with the four frameworks respectively. His slides and related resources can be found at Comparing Native Java REST API Frameworks - Manchester JUG 2022 . Here is my thought after the talk: Java is still hugely popular and widely used ( Yay! ). The community should contribute to the language to encourage more younger generation to adopt it. Use SDKMAN to manage multiple JDK in a local computer Use HTTPie which is better than cURL for testing API Test OpenID Connect requests and debug responses with OpenID Connect debugger Build optimized Docker images for your Java applications with Jib Compare with startup time which does matter for Serverless Tak...

Manchester Java Community hosted an event in a dog friendly office of Kin + Carta . We learnt about digital transformation experience as well as Brian Benz live coding with Github and Azure new features.  Digital Transformation experience is about to transform an enterprise to agilely adapt the digital technology, such as API Gateway and Cloud Routing, to bring better user experience. Thanking the cloud advocate Brian, he brought us Octoverse Report about better performance and well being for developers. He also showed us a fun feature of Github Co-pilot as an AI pair programmer as well as more practical features in Github: Github Codespaces and Github-hosted runners . Certainly the key topic Brian demonstrated is Feature Filters in Azure App. This new feature is helpful for A/B Testing and Blue-Green Deployment. I was feeling chilled when I had a chat with participants in person. We shared our struggles in WFH and our daily coding works.

 Is it an illusion? A glamorous temptation. or reflection of shadow? A history of sorrow.