The last conference of the “Spring” 2026 season for me was Devoxx Poland. This was my third time speaking at this conference, and my second trip to Kraków this year.
This year I again had the honor of delivering two talks: Getting more out of Maven (without Andres Almiray this time) and Reading Code.
Polish JUG Meetup
The evening before the conference I went to a Polish JUG meetup, to meet up with friends Adrian Nowak, Ida and others. Adrian gave me a GeeCON shirt and sticker. It was also nice to see ex-colleague Pasha Finkelstein, who was speaking at the meetup.
Day 1
Since I was giving two talks, I spent some time preparing for them. Especially as I would be giving the Maven talk by myself this time, as Andres unfortunately was not able to make it. And also it had been a while since I last gave my Reading Code talk.
During the day, I did go meet my colleagues at the booth; conferences are always a good place to see and meet colleagues. JetBrains has offices all over Europe (including Poland) and several other countries.
At the end of the day, I went to see an new talk From compose.yaml to Testcontainers: testing Kibana with one line of Java by Piotr Przybył.
After that, it was time for the meet and greet; a great opportunity to talk to other speakers and attendees.
Day 2
On day 2, it was time for the first one of my talks: Getting more out of Maven in the main hall.
Based on the positive feedback I received, I would say the the talk went very well as a solo talk.
And even though Andres was not there in person, here was there in spirit.
Later in the morning it was time for Reading Code. When I first submitted this talk to Devoxx Poland two years ago, a friend on the Program Committee sent me a nice message about how much they liked the abstract. Unfortunately, it was not selected that time (but another talk was). So it was nice to be able to finally deliver this talk here.
Thanks to my colleague Ernest Mołczan for coming to my talk.
With both of my talks done, I had time to see some talks in the afternoon.
First, it was time to see Refactoring to Modernize Java Applications by Venkat Subramaniam. If you have ever seen Venkat speak, you know it is always well worth your time.
Next, I went to see another talk by Piotr Prybył, SIMD for Java: how Elasticsearch already benefits from the Panama Vector API. During his talk he reused a demo from our talk Learning modern Java the playful way, but with way more in depth information about Vector API and how Elastic uses it.
After that I joined the talk IntelliJ Super Productivity in 45 Minutes by Heinz Kabutz. It is always interesting to see how other people use IntelliJ IDEA, what features they prefer and how they customize it.
Speaker dinner
In the evening it was time for the speaker dinner. It was a nice walk to get there, in the company of Anita Przybył and Katarzyna Leszczyńska-Bohdan. The dinner itself was great, with some delicious pierogi and other food. And of course great company.
Day 3
On day 3 I attended a talk by Simone de Gijt. I love her talks; the topics are very interesting and her stage presence is great. Imagine my surprise when she mentioned me in her talk!
At the end of the conference I also managed to catch a talk about Dark Patterns by Sergès Goma. We had been at the same conference before, but had not yet properly met, so we finally got to fix that.
After the talks, a few of us had some conversations in the hallway.
In the end, being part of the community and meeting people in real life are the highlights of any conference.
Going home
After the conference, Simone and I took the bus back to the airport. We spent some time in the lounge, running into other speakers like Abdel Sghiouar, Simon Maple and Simon Brown.
Overall, Devoxx Poland was a great conference to close out the “spring” season; I hope to be back next year!
Pictures
You can find the official pictures by Dimitris Doutsiopoulos here: