Quarkus at Devoxx UK 2026

[insectengine]

Event Description: The UK's premier conference for Java developers. Practical insights and strategies to tackle today’s toughest challenges whilst preparing for what’s emerging next.

Date: May 6-7, 2026
Location: London, UK
Event Type: In-Person

https://www.devoxx.co.uk/

Wednesday Sessions

Session: Building with Open Source AI: A Crash Course
Speaker(s): Daniel Oh, Cedric Clyburn, & Legare Kerrison
Date/Time: Wednesday from 11:00 - 12:30 in Coding Cafe
Abstract: Thanks to open source, in the past year, we’ve seen a fundamental change: developers and enterprises are moving away from proprietary, closed-source models. To save costs, prioritize privacy, and allow for customization, they are building, testing, and deploying their own open models. However, this journey can feel overwhelming. Which foundation model should I use? How do I connect my model to existing data sources or build agentic capabilities to start seeing real value with AI, especially in an already existing Java application?

The key to navigating this emerging path is adopting the flexibility, transparency, and collaboration of open source that many of us are familiar with. We'll walk through the critical aspects of AI feature implementation using LangChain4J, also showing observability (OpenTelemetry), testing (Promptfoo), CI/CD (Tekton) and more. Join us as we get hands-on with language models and use open technologies to control our own AI journey!

Session: Five (and a half) Cool Things You Can Do With Quarkus
Speaker(s): Holly Cummins
Date/Time: Wednesday from 11:00 - 11:50 in Room A
Abstract: There's a lot more than five cool things you can do, but here are some of the ones Holly will show, in this demo-driven session:

1. Save the world.
2. Lightning-quick CLIs.
3. Embed WASM.
4. Run Spring code.
5. AI, in your apps.
   5½. Use Minecraft as an observability client. Ok, this one isn’t cool, it’s stupid, but Holly’s done it anyway.

Some are established and important Quarkus capabilities, 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.

Session: When benchmarks go bad - what I learned from measuring performance wrong
Speaker(s): Holly Cummins
Date/Time: Wednesday from 16:00 - 16:50 in Gallery Hall
Abstract: 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

Thursday Sessions

Session: Beyond the Hype: Agentic AI Patterns for Enterprise Software
Speaker(s): Daniel Oh & Kevin Dubois
Date/Time: Thursday from 10:00 - 10:50 in Room D
Abstract: Developing AI applications today goes beyond simple single-model interactions. We're seeing a shift towards agentic AI systems, where multiple specialized agents work together, each capable of independent reasoning. While there’s a myriad of ‘low-code’, ‘citizen developer’, and vendor-backed solutions, the real challenge for an AI architect lies in effectively building, orchestrating, and deploying these custom, collaborative systems to production. Despite all the promises from “AI” vendors, actual custom software development and a robust deployment strategy are essential for success.

Given the diverse and complex tasks these systems handle, a "one-size-fits-all" approach to coordination just doesn't work. We'll explore the spectrum of agentic patterns, from reliable but rigid workflows to highly flexible, autonomous agent orchestration using LLMs, and everything in between.

This talk will cover:

• The pros and cons of various agentic patterns.
• Practical demonstrations of how to combine these patterns using LangChain4j and its Quarkus extension.
• How to leverage the provided infrastructure for agent collaboration.
• The flexibility to implement and seamlessly integrate your own custom agentic patterns.

Session: The Next Evolution of Java: ☕️ Achieving Hyper Performance and Efficiency in Cloud Native Workloads
Speaker(s): Daniel Oh
Date/Time: Thursday from 15:00 - 15:50 in Room D
Abstract: Java is fundamentally changing. Enterprises deploying to Kubernetes now demand nanosecond startup times, minimal memory footprints, and fully optimized containers. This advanced session goes beyond basic JVM tuning to explore the cutting edge of Java modernization for cloud-native deployment. We’ll provide a deep dive and comparative analysis of optimization techniques, including Jib for minimal image creation, utilizing GraalVM Native Image for incredible cold-start acceleration, and leveraging the CRaC project (Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint) for state-of-the-art responsiveness. Join this hands-on Cloud Native Experience walkthrough to see live demonstrations of complex configuration patterns, detailed trade-off discussions, and actionable strategies for dramatically improving the cost-efficiency and velocity of your containerized Java microservices.

Session: Local Development in the AI Era
Speaker(s): Kevin Dubois & Cedric Clyburn
Date/Time: Thursday from 15:00 - 15:50 in Room B
Abstract: Most of us like to do local development. It means we’re in control of any dependencies, network issues/latency, configurations and cost. And we love to say that “It works on my machine” don’t we? 🙂

Now, with the advent of AI-driven development, it has become more challenging than ever before to do pure local development.

In this session we’ll take a look at various solutions to continue to do local, network-optional development, even with AI:

• Run AI models locally.
• Evaluate different code assistants that can work with these locally running models
• Explore how to infuse AI capabilities from local models into our code
• Compare models from different vendors; and with different sizes to find the right balance between performance and accuracy
• Weigh pros and cons of using local vs remote models

Come to this session to learn more about local development while leveraging AI to optimize our development flow, code and our functionality itself!