Amsterdam JUG Meetup at BeFrank

Join in with the latest Amsterdam JUG Meetup at BeFrank, De Entree 99-197, 1101 HE Amsterdam.

Agenda

17:00 - Doors Open (And Food!)
17:30 - 18:00 Talk 1: "When the Currents Take You: Why Teams Must Take Ownership of Technical Debt" by David Veen
18:00 - 18:30 Talk 2: "From CRUD to Durable: Adding Temporal Workflows to the Spring Pet Clinic" by Geertjan Wielenga
18:30 Short Break
18:45 - 19:15 Talk 3: "Stop Building AI Tools Backwards" by Jonas Jebing
19:30 - End

Talk 1: "When the Currents Take You: Why Teams Must Take Ownership of Technical Debt" by David Veen

Technical debt is one of the most widely used metaphors in software engineering — and one of the most poorly understood. Since Ward Cunningham coined the term in 1992, the concept has drifted far from its original meaning, becoming a catch-all for anything wrong with a codebase. This imprecision has consequences: when everything is tech debt, nothing is prioritized.

This talk draws on Lou Franco's excellent book Swimming in Tech Debt (2025) and the author's first-hand experience with a startup where accumulated technical debt ultimately contributed to the decision to shut down operations. Franco's framework of forces and dimensions offers a structured, data-driven starting point for analyzing, communicating, and addressing tech debt that moves beyond vague appeals for "refactoring time."

We examine what tech debt is, why it is chronically underprioritized in organizations, and what development teams can do about it. Giving teams the tools to take ownership is key: to make debt visible, tie it to business outcomes, and advocate for targeted investment. The alternative is not some abstract risk of stagnation. The speaker's startup experience illustrates what happens when tech debt goes unmanaged for too long: when the moment comes to adapt, the codebase won't let you.

Talk 2: "From CRUD to Durable: Adding Temporal Workflows to the Spring Pet Clinic" by Geertjan Wielenga

Spring Boot applications excel at handling synchronous CRUD operations, but what happens when you need to send appointment reminders days in advance, manage multi-year vaccination schedules, or orchestrate complex payment workflows that must survive server restarts?

In this talk, we'll transform the classic Spring Pet Clinic application by integrating Temporal.io -- the free and open source durable execution platform that makes long-running processes reliable by default.

You'll learn how to:

• Identify which operations benefit from Temporal (and which don't)
• Implement appointment reminders that survive server restarts
• Build multi-year vaccination schedules with Signals and Queries
• Apply the Saga pattern for reliable payment processing
• Test workflows with Spring Boot's testing framework
• Deploy workers separately from your web tier

We'll start with a 5-minute "Hello World" workflow, then progressively build real Pet Clinic features, showing complete code examples you can use in your own applications.

By the end, you'll understand when and how to add Temporal to Spring Boot apps, with practical patterns for background jobs, scheduled reminders, and complex orchestration.

Talk 3: "Stop Building AI Tools Backwards" by Jonas Jebing

Many current AI tools are designed in ways that inadvertently hinder human learning and skill development by removing critical reasoning loops. Instead of empowering practitioners, these tools often prioritize immediate outcomes over the process of understanding.

This talk explores how we can shift our approach to building AI tools that act as instructors rather than "junior co-workers." We will delve into the theory of Retrieval Practice and introduce the EDGE framework (Explain, Demonstrate, Guide, and Enhance) to design AI interactions that reinforce human learning, facilitate social reasoning, and encourage team-based cumulative iteration. Join us to learn how to build AI-augmented workflows that accelerate human execution in-process rather than replacing it.

The talk is based on this blog post with the same title “Stop building AI tools backwards” by Hazel Weakly. In addition to what the blog post covers, we’re going to take a deeper look at when and how these patterns can be applied.