Last week I had the pleasure of attending Devoxx UK for the third time! It was a great two days.
Arriving in London
Immediately upon arrival I ran into Dimitris Doutsiopoulos at the hotel. Great start to the conference!
After checking in, I first had to do some work. Next I went to find Piotr Przybył to return some equipment he had left behind at Voxxed Days Bucharest the week before. We then headed to the speaker dinner together; and ran into Baruch Sadogursky before we even made it out of the hotel.
Speaker dinner
Speaker dinners are always a great chance to catch up with familiar faces and meet new people. From some of the organisers (Mark Hazell, Kim Fletcher, Sam Hepburn and others) to other speakers like Ana-Maria Mihalceanu, Brian Vermeer, Alexander Chatzizacharias, Ixchel Ruiz, Matthias Haeussler, Maarten Mulders and many, many more! Just like last year, it was impossible to get from A to B without running into more people to greet. There simply wasn’t enough time to talk to everyone. Instead, I ended up having a really great conversation with Thomas Wuerthinger.
Opening session
The conference kicked off with live music(!) and a welcome by Mark Hazell and Kim Fletcher. Mark had announced earlier that this will be his last time organising Devoxx UK, and he will be missed.
My talk: Be more productive with IntelliJ IDEA
Fortunately, my talk was scheduled in the morning of day 1. It’s nice to get it out of the way, and this gave me the opportunity to invite people to stop by our booth during the conference.
The talk Be more productive with IntelliJ IDEA is never the same, as I try to incorporate new features. For starters, I’ve updated my demo to show more Command Completion (“dot dot”), which is a new(ish) feature that unlocks any commands relevant to your context in the editor. New this time was a sneak preview of Logpoint, a feature that gives you the option to add “logging” to your application without changing the code or redeploying your application. This feature will be added to the upcoming IntelliJ IDEA 2026.2 release, but you can already try it in the EAP, which you can download using the JetBrains Toolbox App.
It was nice to have an (almost) full room, despite my talk not being about AI. In fact, I warned the audience there would be “handcrafted, artisanal code” and very little AI. But they seemed ok with that… Several people, including colleagues(!!) told me they learned some new things. To be honest, I don’t think there’s anyone inside JetBrains who knows all the features.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the talk was recorded. If you’d like to see a previous recording of the talk, you can find them on the talk page.
Booth
This year, we had a JetBrains booth at Devoxx UK. This is a great opportunity for us to speak to our users as well as people working on libraries and frameworks in the ecosystem. It’s also a good opportunity for people to stop by with questions and feedback.
My colleague Andrei Kogun told me that several people stopped by our booth during the conference to ask about the new Logpoint feature that I showed in my talk!
An added bonus for me is that I get to see some of my colleagues in person.
Spring Documentary premiere and panel
In the evening of day 1, there was a premiere of theSpring documentary:
Following the screening, there was a panel with several of the cast members who were at Devoxx UK: Josh Long, David Syer, Steve Poole and myself. The panel was moderated by Daniel Garnier-Moiroux. It was interesting to discuss some of the history of Spring.
After the panel, we went for a quick dinner with friends Andrzej Grzesik, his wife Ewa, Piotr Przybył, Marek Machnik and several others.
Talks
This year, I did not attend many talks, as I was busy talking to people at the booth and in the hallway. One talk I didn’t want to miss was Piotr‘s talk Butcher Virtual Threads like a pro! as I always like sseing him speak. It was certainly different to be in the audience for a change, instead of on stage together. Although there was a little audience participation 😉
I did also manage to attend The Structured Concurrency API in JDK 26: Scoped and Joiners by José Paumard, which was very interesting. You can find the slides here.
Hallway track
Of course, the best track of any conference is the hallway track. Unexpectedly, I ran into my colleague Sonya Kondirova from the Java Build Tools team (we have worked together on new features for Maven and Gradle) which was a nice surprise.
Also, I got to spend some time with Estelle Landry (probably more at Devoxx UK, than in our lightning trip to Devoxx France recently).
Finally, I managed to sit down with Holly Cummins to give her some tailored pointers for presenting with IntelliJ IDEA (at her request). It’s fun to share tips and tricks, and I hope they will come in handy!
Again there was not enough time to talk to everyone as much as I would have liked. But there is always the next one!
Heading home
Unfortunately I had to leave in the afternoon of day 2 to catch my flight, which meant I missed some of the last talks and the party. Maybe next year… 🤞
Thank you!
Many thanks to the organisers , volunteers and sponsors for putting on such a great event. Thanks to all the speakers and attendees; it was great to see and meet you! Hope to see you at the next one 😉
Links
Photos by Dimitris Doutsiopoulos 🫶
