Kotlin + AI MeetUp Rotterdam - Best practices and Eval-Driven Development
Details
Hello, Kotlin enthusiasts!
Our next MeetUp will take place in Rotterdam on 9 April.
Join us on an evening filled with tasty food, refreshing drinks, and insightful Kotlin discussions.
Make sure to press the RSVP button!
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📍 Location:
Maqqie, Coolsingel 135, 3012 AG Rotterdam, 5th floor (Same building like bookshop ‘Donner’)
🕒 Timeline:
• 17:15 – 18:00 Arrival / doors open. 18:00 doors close
• 17:15 – 18:10 Food and drinks 🍕
• 18:10 – 18:15 Opening 🎙️
• 18:15 – 19:05 Best practices for building Kotlin applications with AI - Luc Klaassen 💻
• 19:05 – 19:20 Break
• 19:20 – 20:05 Eval-Driven Development: The Fine Line Between Agentic Success and Failure - demonstrated on JVM AI frameworks (Spring-AI, LangChain4j, Koog) - Urs Peter 💻
• 20:05 Chats & Drinks 👥
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Talk 1: Best practices for building Kotlin applications with AI
Abstract:
Everyone and their mother is talking about AI-augmented software development, but what does it actually look like in practice? Three months ago, I was a skeptic. Then I built an electronic patient dossier from scratch in Kotlin with AI as my co-pilot, and went from skeptic to evangelist. In this talk, I’ll walk you through my evolving workflow, the tools I tried (and dropped), and the mindset shift that made it click. You’ll leave with a practical approach you can apply to your own Kotlin projects, whether you’re doubtful, curious, or ready to dive in.
Bio:
Luc Klaassen is Head of Engineering at Maqqie, a Dutch HR tech platform that’s using technology to innovate the labour market by facilitating new, compliant ways of working. He’s been building software since 2013 and has spent the last few years figuring out how to make engineering teams thrive. When he’s not wrangling codebases, he’s probably arguing with an AI about how to write them.
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Talk 2: Eval-Driven Development: The Fine Line Between Agentic Success and Failure - demonstrated on JVM AI frameworks (Spring-AI, LangChain4j, Koog)
Abstract:
Agentic systems unlock capabilities that traditional “deterministic” applications simply can’t deliver. But there’s a catch: their probabilistic nature introduces real and often unexpected risks—hallucinations, context drift, prompt degradation, and multi-step workflows that evolve in surprising ways. And you definitely don’t want to discover those in production.
The good news: there is a remedy. We can borrow the most reliable practice from deterministic software—test-driven development—and adapt it to the agentic world. The result is Eval-Driven Development (EDD): a systematic, engineering-first approach to bringing reliability into inherently probabilistic systems.
In this talk, we explore Eval-Driven Agentic Development and how it can transform your agents from unpredictable to reliable. We’ll dive into the techniques, tools, and patterns needed to make evaluation a first-class citizen of your development process—demonstrating all of these in a real-world application built with state-of-the-art JVM AI frameworks, like Spring-AI, Langchain4j, Koog, etc.
Evaluation-Driven Development is the only path forward for reliable, smart next-generation applications. Let’s learn how to walk it - together!
Bio:
Urs is a seasoned software engineer, solution architect, conference speaker, and trainer with over 20 years of experience building resilient, scalable, and mission-critical systems, primarily in Kotlin, Scala, and Java.
Besides his job as a consultant, he is also a passionate trainer and author of a wide range of courses, including language courses for Kotlin and Scala, generative AI courses for the JVM platform, as well as architectural trainings on Microservices and Event-Driven Architectures.
As a people person by nature, he loves to share knowledge, inspire, and be inspired by peers at meetups and conferences. Urs is a JetBrains-certified Kotlin trainer.
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RSVP Now!
Don't forget to RSVP to secure your seat—spots are limited! We can't wait to see you there and discuss the future of Kotlin and software architecture.



