More Than a Blog: How Foojay Connects, Sustains, and Evolves the Java Community (#94)

Foojay.io, the website for the Friends of OpenJDK, is turning six years old. To celebrate, Frank Delporte headed to JCON in Cologne, Germany, and sat down with twelve members of the Java community to talk about what Foojay means to them, what they learn from each other, and how the community is evolving. Foojay is more than a blog. It is a Mastodon server, a Slack community, the Disco API, a book on sustainability, a podcast, and now an education catalog. Six years in, it is still growing, still community-driven, and still very much a place where anyone who works with Java is welcome. 00:00 Introduction 02:16 Sharat Chandar https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharatchander/ Java community and history What you can learn from conferences and articles 05:37 Markus Westergren https://www.linkedin.com/in/markuswestergren/ https://foojay.io/sustainability-for-java-developers/ https://foojay.io/today/join-slack-com-t-foojay-signup/ Book "Sustainability for Java Developers" How to "sustain yourself" in this strange-AI-changing-world 09:46 Iryna Dohndorf https://www.linkedin.com/in/iryna-dohndorf/ https://foojay.io/today/author/iryna-dohndorf/ Mentoring about sustainability as a developer + groundness + robustness skills High performance without crushing your soul 13:59 René Schwietzke https://www.linkedin.com/in/reneschwietzke/ https://foojay.io/today/the-curious-case-of-different-runtimes-with-different-training-data-jit/ Diving deep into the runtime, JITWatch About the broad mix of topics handled on Foojay 18:28 Gerrit Grunwald https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerritgrunwald/ https://foojay.io/today/author/gerrit-grunwald/ https://foojay.io/today/disco-api-helping-you-to-find-any-openjdk-distribution/ https://sdkman.io/ The Disco API, the source with all the available OpenJDK distributions, is used by SDKMAN, Gradle, and many other tools About the many distributions that are available, even ones that are mainly (and only) used in Asia 27:45 Catherine Edelveis https://foojay.io/today/author/catherine-edelveis/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ytdo8OGEYFI https://foojay.io/today/which-java-runtime-should-you-use-in-production-comparing-openjdk-distributions/ Reducing Docker sizes improves security and performance Many distributors provide builds of OpenJDK 31:16 Jago de Vreede https://foojay.io/today/author/jago-de-vreede/ About the Java community and the place of Foojay in it. What is good, what are we missing? SDKMAN, creating an UI for it, and using the many OpenJDK distributions 35:05 Annelore Egger https://www.linkedin.com/in/anneloredev/ https://foojay.io/?s=egger Java community, conference volunteering, mentoring How to become a conference speaker Learn by teaching 38:03 Buhake Sindi https://www.linkedin.com/in/buhake-sindi/ https://foojay.io/today/author/buhake-sindi/ https://github.com/langchain4j/langchain4j-cdi Jakarta EE, LangChain4J CDI, Agent to Agent Impact of AI on developer life and sustainability 44:03 François Martin https://www.linkedin.com/in/fran%C3%A7oismartin/ https://foojay.io/today/author/francois-martin/ https://foojay.io/today/eliminating-flaky-tests-to-end-world-hunger/ https://foojay.io/today/five-ways-to-use-gradle-enterprise-to-identify-and-manage-flaky-tests/ Learn from mentoring, for example, how to earn from opensource Foojay author, just published an article about Flaky tests 48:18 Dominika Tasarz-Sochacka https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominikatasarz/ https://foojay.io/today/author/dominika-tasarz/ https://foojay.io/today/join-slack-com-t-foojay-signup/ https://foojay.io/today/how-to-submit-your-next-article-on-foojay-io/ The future of Foojay, how can we get the community even more involved What you can learn from the community 51:18 Geertjan Wielenga https://www.linkedin.com/in/geertjanwielenga/ https://education.foojay.social/ Java communities are everywhere How Foojay started and grew How can contributing to the community influence your career 58:15 Conclusion