LJC - London Java Community

LJC Roundtable with Jamie Coleman from Loqate

Tue, Aug 11 · 6:00 PM BST

Loqate, 128 Queen Victoria Street London EC4V 4BJ United Kingdom, London, GB

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Join us for the next LJC roundtable evening this time with a special guest.

Roundtables give everyone a chance to ask (and answer questions) on any tech subject they want. We are a bunch of friendly folks who like to meet in an informal environment and discuss and broadly understand technology in general.

This event is hosted by Jamie Coleman, Senior Developer Advocate at Loqate, a GBG Solution.

Jamie is a Senior Developer Advocate for Loqate formally at IBM & Sonatype, based in the UK. He has had the privilege to have spoken all around the world at developer conferences and is an organiser of London’s biggest developer community, the London Java Community.

Passionate about discovering ways to help reduce developers carbon footprint, he is also a subject matter expert in containerised solutions and build technologies. He fell in love with coding at university and has gone on to talk at many conferences about using languages like Java with microservices and related technologies such as AI and software security. He has worked on a wide variety of projects such as modernising IBMs mainframe testing infrastructure, creating, and automating the creation of Docker images for IBM’s products and contributing to a DevOps pipeline offering.

Event Venue :
Loqate office - 128 Queen Victoria Street, London, EC4V 4BJ
Date and Time - Tuesday 11th August from 6pm-8pm

The entrance is on the opposite side of the building closest to St Paul's Cathedral

LJC Meetup at Engine by Starling

Thu, Oct 1 · 6:00 PM BST

Engine by Starling, 5th Floor, London Fruit and Wool Exchange, 1 Duval Square, London, E1 6PW, London, GB

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LJC Meet-ups is a series of events, aimed at giving all Community members an opportunity to present at an LJC event.

Join us on 1st October 2026 for a London Java Community meetup hosted at Engine by Starling.

Speakers:
Chris Davies, Infrastructure Engineer, Starling Bank

Title:
No Magic, Until It's Worth It: Improving Our Logs with MDC

Abstract:
Good logs should let you answer many questions. Relying on the raw message alone isn't enough. This is the story of how we tried to get there on a platform of 100+ microservices at Engine by Starling — and the "no magic" rule we ended up bending to do it.

Expect a tour through the trade offs of production logging: raw strings, structuring context with Java's MDC, preventing leaks, and why we broke our own rules and reached for a divisive mechanism - Aspect Oriented Programming.

Speaker bio:
Chris Davies is a Staff Software Engineer at Engine by Starling, working in the Payment Card domain to ensure Engine's platform can cope with new payment schemes and global regions. He also leads efforts on Engine's AI tooling, to help developers get the most out of it.

He's spent the better part of a decade in FinTech writing Java and JVM languages (with some TypeScript and Python along the way) and working with AWS serverless technologies. Outside of work, he enjoys attending conferences/meetups, and picking up the odd bit of teaching and technical reviewing when the opportunity arises.

Trisha Gee, Engineer, author, keynote speaker and developer champion

Title:
Shiny New Tools Won't Fix Your Problem

Abstract:
Generative AI can help us produce code faster than ever before, but faster code generation does not automatically translate into faster or safer delivery. In practice, AI acts as an amplifier: teams with strong engineering fundamentals improve, while teams with existing bottlenecks and weak software development practices feel those problems more acutely.

Writing code is cheaper. Testing, troubleshooting, building, deploying, understanding and changing it is not.

In this talk, we’ll look past the hype and focus on what actually drives productivity in an AI-accelerated world. We’ll explore why shiny new tools don’t fix broken systems, why optimising individual steps rarely improves end-to-end flow, and why software engineering fundamentals matter more — not less — when code is easy to generate.

We’ll also look at how observability and measurement help teams understand where time is really being spent, and why accelerating feedback is essential if AI is going to help rather than hurt.

You’ll leave with a clear understanding of:

• Which engineering practices consistently improve outcomes in an AI world and provide vital safety nets
• Why good design and readable code still matter
• What to measure to understand whether AI is really making your team more productive

This is not an anti-AI talk. It’s a reminder that the hard parts of software didn’t get easier, and that fundamentals determine whether AI makes us faster, or breaks us faster.

Speaker bio:
Trisha is a software engineer, Java Champion and author. Trisha has developed Java applications for a range of industries of all sizes, including finance, manufacturing and non-profit, and she's a lead developer advocate at Gradle. She has expertise in Java high-performance systems and dabbles with Open Source development.

Trisha’s exceptionally passionate about sharing things that help real developers. That might be: getting them up to speed on the latest version of Java; teaching them tips and tricks to improve their productivity; or promoting healthy technical communities across the globe. Trisha values helping all developers level up their career and skills at every step of their journey.

Read more from Trisha in the books “Head First Java”, “Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEA”, “97 Things Every Java Developer Should Know” and “What to Look for in a Code Review”.

Huge thanks to our friends at Engine by Starling for sponsoring this event and supporting our Community.

Please register on Eventbrite to join this event.