June started off with not one, but two Java conferences: jPrime in Sofia, Bulgaria, and JSpring in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
When travelling to jPrime from Amsterdam, I already ran into two fellow Dutch speakers Hinse ter Schuur and Willem Jan Glerum at Schiphol airport. We were all on the same flight.
Arriving in Sofia
Upon arrival in Sofia, we met up with Piotr Przybył in the arrivals hall, as he had landed just before us. We then proceeded to arrivals to meet up with Ivan St. Ivanov, one of the jPrime organisers, who drove us to our hotel.
At the hotel, Piotr and I had some lunch before preparing for our talk (as it had been a few weeks since we last presented it at GeeCON).
jPrime speaker dinner
We then walked to the speaker dinner where we met up with Mitya, other organisers and several other speakers including François Martin, Johannes Bechberger, Arnaud Jean. Also present was my colleague Andrei Kogun, who was attending the conference. It is always nice to see him in person, as we work together a lot but he is located in a different country.
Speaking at jPrime
Our talk Learning modern Java the playful way was scheduled right after the opening. It was really nice to speak in the big room in front of about 800 people (probably our largest audience for this talk so far!).
Our talk was well received. Thanks to everyone who came up afterwards to talk to us! Meeting people is one of my favorite parts of conferences.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get to stay long and we had to head to the airport not long after our talk.
You can catch the recording of our talk here:
You can also find pictures for day 1 and day 2.
Thanks to the jPrime team for having us and taking such good care of speakers!
On to the next one!
From Sofia, I travelled back to the Netherlands, to speak at JSpring the next day. While I had planned to go to the speaker dinner that evening, it was too tempting to go straight home as I live close to the airport.
Speaking at JSpring
JSpring is one of my local conferences, organised by NLJUG. This was my third time speaking there, and I have attended several years prior to that. The lineup this year was stellar as always!
Since the conference was in a cinema, they had posters advertising the speakers. It was slightly intimidating to see my face up there, but also very nice…
The conference was opened (as always) by Brian Vermeer and Bert Jan Schrijver, followed by the opening keynote by Sven Peters.
This year, I really enjoyed the keynote by Felienne Hermans:
The following keynote by Baruch Sadogursky was also very nice.
My session Be more productive with IntelliJ IDEA was in the afternoon, so I had plenty of time to prepare. Even though the outline of this session is always similar, I like to include the latest features like command completion and upcoming features like logpoints (which is included in IntelliJ IDEA 2026.2).
You can watch the session here:
You can find the full playlist for JSpring 2026 on YouTube.
As always, the best part of the conference was meeting people; both the other speakers and the people from the Duch Java community.
Thanks again NLJUG for organising and I hope to be back for many years to come!