tag:speakerdeck.com,2005:/hollycummins tag:speakerdeck.com,2005:Talk/1548864 2026-06-01T03:06:33-04:00 2026-06-02T04:24:43-04:00 Quarkus applications are quick to code, start fast, and require much less hardware than their Spring Boot equivalents. They use less memory, less electricity, and handle much higher load. They make both developers and LLMs more productive, saving both time and tokens. So can we quantify the financial benefits of switching from Spring Boot to Quarkus? Yes. (Spoiler – it’s good!) In this talk, Holly will explain the architectural choices which make Quarkus fast. She’ll explain how to choose between JVM and native run modes, depending what kind of “fast” you need. Finally, she’ll demonstrate options for getting from Spring to Quarkus quickly and cheaply, for a near-immediate return on investment. Holly Cummins (@hollycummins) tag:speakerdeck.com,2005:Talk/1546758 2026-05-26T11:52:23-04:00 2026-05-26T12:00:01-04:00 The code we write has a climate impact. But how big is that impact? How do we measure it? How do we reduce it? Is the cloud helping? What’s going on with Virginia? Are we still allowed to do CI/CD? Will native compilation save us? Is Java even a good choice anymore? This talk discusses some of the trade-offs for a modern software developer, and provides a roadmap to figuring out the right thing. Holly Cummins (@hollycummins) tag:speakerdeck.com,2005:Talk/1537676 2026-05-05T13:16:20-04:00 2026-05-06T10:16:45-04:00 The world of performance analysis is littered with flawed claims, cognitive biases, dangerous intuitions, and beguiling fallacies. Sadly, Holly has been guilty of all of the above! Repeatedly. But this is a no-judgement zone. Some measurement anti-patterns are subtle, and some are downright counter-intuitive. In this talk, Holly will explain why measuring performance is important, and talk through some of the ways it can go wrong. That would be depressing if that was all there was, so she’ll also introduce a toolbox of questions and principles that you can use to improve the performance of your own applications. These include: - How to set up a test system - Recommended load generators - The USE method Holly Cummins (@hollycummins) tag:speakerdeck.com,2005:Talk/1531312 2026-04-20T06:27:38-04:00 2026-04-20T07:54:16-04:00 Holly, Eric, and Franz discuss some of the lessons learned in creating the new Quarkus benchmark suite. Holly Cummins (@hollycummins) tag:speakerdeck.com,2005:Talk/1524160 2026-04-01T07:46:15-04:00 2026-06-17T04:30:26-04:00 Let’s abuse the tools! Everyone knows Quarkus is computationally efficient, expressive, and rock-solid for production. But did you know that we can use Quarkus efficiency to build applications that shouldn’t go anywhere *near* production? In this demo-driven session, Holly will put the joy into “developer joy”. She’ll show you all sorts of things you can do with Quarkus that you probably shouldn’t: - Build an LLM-powered app that’s *guaranteed* to hallucinate, because you can do more than you think with guardrails, and truth is so boring - Write your business code in rockstarlang, because everything should be a hair metal ballad - Use Minecraft as your observability client, because the LGTM stack doesn’t have enough explosions - Write a CLI for generating memes faster, because everything is better on the command-line - Benchmark an application against a grapefruit, because metric units aren’t tasty Business value? Learning? If you insist. As well as absurd demos, you’ll leave this session with a deeper understanding of how to get the most out of Quarkus and Java. There will be new Java 25 language features, Quarkus best practices, powerful integrations, and nifty use cases alongside the silly explosions and grapefruit. Holly Cummins (@hollycummins) tag:speakerdeck.com,2005:Talk/1518625 2026-03-18T18:52:03-04:00 2026-03-18T19:01:36-04:00 Open source is a marvellous multiplier which amplifies our collective productivity by allowing us to code on the shoulders of giants. It has clear benefits for business continuity. But things can go wrong. Many critical projects have just one or two maintainers (we’ve all seen the xkcd cartoon about modern digital infrastructure, haven’t we?). Sometimes those maintainers no longer have time, or burn out. At the other end of the spectrum, even projects with many active contributors can grind to a halt with the contributors all work for the same employer, and that employer changes their business priorities. Investment can dry up or the licence can change. After all, the business environment for open source is tough these days. What can be done? The classic solution for increasing a team’s bus number is to use pair programming to share knowledge. In the asynchronous and distributed world of open source, pair programming can work, but it’s harder – and it can’t fix changing business realities or hostile licence changes. This talk will discuss some of the strategies used by the Quarkus team to help ensure our open source community is prepared … for almost anything. These include - Using GitHub organisations to allow independent contributions with a ‘safety’ backup if maintainers disappear - Productising dependencies so that anything in the stack can be rebuilt to address vulnerabilities; this helps with security, and also helps with investment - Joining the Commonhaus foundation to ensure Quarkus can’t ever be owned by a single company Some of these have been easy, some have been tough (the logistics of moving to a foundation are not for the faint-hearted). In this talk, Holly and Sanne will reflect on what’s worked well, what’s transferrable, and how all of us can be prepared for the future of open source. Holly Cummins (@hollycummins) tag:speakerdeck.com,2005:Talk/1517263 2026-03-15T17:58:17-04:00 2026-03-17T15:40:18-04:00 Why do the same ideas keep coming round again, and again? Why is it that sometimes an idea sticks, and sometimes it just fades away? Why is it that no technology, or pattern, or method, is ever quite as good as we’re told it’s going to be? Why are we working harder, even though AI is supposed to be doing the work for us? Is debt inevitable? How do external factors influence the day-to-day reality of our jobs? In this wide-ranging session, Holly will discuss interest rates, ahead-of-time compilation, how venture capital works, why our codebases might be feeling the AI hangover, and the future of developer jobs. Holly Cummins (@hollycummins) tag:speakerdeck.com,2005:Talk/1517240 2026-03-15T10:51:43-04:00 2026-03-15T10:56:53-04:00 In 2026, we’ve learned not to measure developer productivity by lines of code. What actually matters is the velocity of the "inner loop" and getting to production. Agentic AI and hyper-distributed deployment topologies solve many problems, but developers still face many of the same frictions – cognitive overload, code overload, and configuration overload. This session mixes a high level strategic overview of the modern developer journey with live demos of how IBM’s modern frameworks bring the developer joy It will cover: - Why developer productivity is about more than outputs - Standard First Architecture: Why relying on Jakarta EE and MicroProfile creates portable, future-proof systems. - Observability by Design: Moving beyond simple logging to a standardized telemetry approach that provides instant feedback. - How to identify and eliminate "toil" in your specific development lifecycle. Holly Cummins (@hollycummins) tag:speakerdeck.com,2005:Talk/1463999 2025-11-11T10:20:48-05:00 2025-11-11T10:26:47-05:00 Quarkus makes both people and hardware more efficient. That’s cool, but how does it work? Usually, we expect to trade-off developer experience against runtime efficiency. In this session, Holly will dive into some of the technical underpinnings of Quarkus’s efficiency. She’ll give advice for those using or considering Quarkus - should you be doing reactive programming? Do native binaries run fastest? The talk includes some theory (what underpins Quarkus’s surprising throughput?) and also live demos (does Quarkus really start faster than a light bulb? What does an integration testing flow with Quarkus look like?) Holly Cummins (@hollycummins) tag:speakerdeck.com,2005:Talk/1461137 2025-11-05T03:40:27-05:00 2025-11-05T07:41:12-05:00 1. Save the world. 2. Lightning-quick CLIs. 3. Embed WASM. 4. Run Spring code. 5. AI, for real. 5½. Use Minecraft as an observability client. Ok, this one isn’t cool, it’s stupid, but Holly’s done it anyway. In this demo-driven session, Holly will show some of her favorite Quarkus capabilities. Some are established and important, some are less well-known, and some are plain silly. But they’re all cool. Whether you’re new to Quarkus or an experienced user, you’ll discover something you didn’t know. Holly Cummins (@hollycummins) tag:speakerdeck.com,2005:Talk/1452534 2025-10-16T05:40:30-04:00 2025-10-16T05:45:58-04:00 Ever been told “work is not a place to be happy?” It’s not true! As developers, our job is to be productive, and we’re most productive when we’re in flow, doing friction-free creation. How do we embrace the happiness paradigm, without throwing out the old ones we also need, such as efficiency and safety? In this talk, Holly will explain how our industry is changing, and present a number of productivity tips for the lazy, happy, developer. Holly Cummins (@hollycummins) tag:speakerdeck.com,2005:Talk/1449052 2025-10-08T16:49:10-04:00 2026-05-13T08:49:36-04:00 Development is about working with computers, right? Well, not quite. Development is all about working with computers (easy), and working with people (hard). Oh, and it’s about physics. Things like the speed of light and thermodynamics influence APIs, because they influence hardware and networking. If, like Holly, you slept through statistics modules in university, it will be a surprise to discover how statistics has changed our development workflows. Finally, we mustn’t forget economics. The end of zero-interest-rates has changed the employment landscape for many of us. In this wide-ranging talk, Holly will cover why the end of Moore’s law means we might finally need to get to grips with concurrent programming, why is Loom a good idea now when green threads were a bad idea, why is AOT a good idea now when it used to be a bad idea, and how much you should care about business studies, finance, and statistics. Holly Cummins (@hollycummins) tag:speakerdeck.com,2005:Talk/1448531 2025-10-07T16:53:04-04:00 2026-01-27T12:44:21-05:00 Let’s abuse the tools! Everyone knows Quarkus is computationally efficient, expressive, and rock-solid for production. But did you know that we can use Quarkus efficiency to build applications that shouldn’t go anywhere *near* production? In this demo-driven session, Holly will put the joy into “developer joy”. She’ll show you all sorts of things you can do with Quarkus that you probably shouldn’t: - Build an LLM-powered app that’s *guaranteed* to hallucinate, because you can do more than you think with guardrails, and truth is so boring - Write your business code in rockstarlang, because everything should be a hair metal ballad - Use Minecraft as your observability client, because the LGTM stack doesn’t have enough explosions - Write a CLI for generating memes faster, because everything is better on the command-line - Benchmark an application against a grapefruit, because metric units aren’t tasty Business value? Learning? If you insist. As well as absurd demos, you’ll leave this session with a deeper understanding of how to get the most out of Quarkus and Java. There will be new Java 25 language features, Quarkus best practices, powerful integrations, and nifty use cases alongside the silly explosions and grapefruit. Holly Cummins (@hollycummins) tag:speakerdeck.com,2005:Talk/1439505 2025-09-17T17:53:00-04:00 2025-09-17T17:59:13-04:00 Development is about working with computers, right? Well, not quite. Development is all about working with computers (easy), and working with people (hard). Oh, and it’s about physics. Things like the speed of light and thermodynamics influence APIs, because they influence hardware and networking. If, like Holly, you slept through statistics modules in university, it will be a surprise to discover how statistics has changed our development workflows. Finally, we mustn’t forget economics. The end of zero-interest-rates has changed the employment landscape for many of us. In this wide-ranging talk, Holly will cover why the end of Moore’s law means we might finally need to get to grips with concurrent programming, why is Loom a good idea now when green threads were a bad idea, why is AOT a good idea now when it used to be a bad idea, and how much you should care about business studies, finance, and statistics. Holly Cummins (@hollycummins) tag:speakerdeck.com,2005:Talk/1400405 2025-07-10T16:01:29-04:00 2025-07-10T17:04:44-04:00 If you’re not experimenting with AI, were you even developing in 2025? LangChain4j is emerging as a de facto standard for LLM integration in Java. In this demo-driven talk, Holly will explore a range of cool LangChain4j capabilities, such as type safe object mapping, stateful context, agents, RAG, guard rails, and fault tolerance. Holly Cummins (@hollycummins) tag:speakerdeck.com,2005:Talk/1375123 2025-05-26T13:14:32-04:00 2025-05-27T03:50:43-04:00 Is efficiency rock and roll? You might think the answer is “no, definitely not, no way.” Efficiency is about doing more with less, and rock n’ roll is all about turning it up to eleven and doing more with more. Efficiency is about being responsible, and rock n’ roll is about being irresponsible. But wait! High overheads are not rock n roll, and they’re not efficient. Spending time on boring tasks is neither rock n roll, nor efficient. We’re spending way too much time writing and running code that doesn’t spark joy. In this talk, Holly will discuss practical patterns for wringing maximum value out of our code, for minimum effort. One of the techniques is sleeping! It turns out, both people and computers should be lazier, and that’s definitely rock n roll. Holly Cummins (@hollycummins) tag:speakerdeck.com,2005:Talk/1366624 2025-05-08T13:15:40-04:00 2025-05-09T06:33:21-04:00 None of us actually like waste, but many of us tolerate it. This is a shame, because waste is really really bad. It makes our software more expensive to develop, and more expensive to run. It contributes to climate change. It means sometimes, people who’d like to use our software, can’t. It slows us down. In this talk, Holly will present a range of practical waste-reduction techniques, including: - LightSwitchOps - Moving computational work to where it hurts least - Measuring the right thing, instead of measuring the wrong thing (harder than it seems!) - Performance profiling basics - Doing less Holly Cummins (@hollycummins) tag:speakerdeck.com,2005:Talk/1364694 2025-05-05T06:34:44-04:00 2025-05-08T11:58:18-04:00 Development is about working with computers, right? Well, not quite. Development is all about working with computers (easy), and working with people (hard). Oh, and it’s about physics. Things like the speed of light and thermodynamics influence APIs, because they influence hardware and networking. If, like Holly, you slept through statistics modules in university, it will be a surprise to discover how statistics has changed our development workflows. Finally, we mustn’t forget economics. The end of zero-interest-rates has changed the employment landscape for many of us. In this wide-ranging talk, Holly will cover why the end of Moore’s law means we might finally need to get to grips with concurrent programming, why is Loom a good idea now when green threads were a bad idea, why is AOT a good idea now when it used to be a bad idea, and how much you should care about business studies, finance, and statistics. Holly Cummins (@hollycummins) 2026-06-01T03:06:33-04:00