We’re excited to welcome you to Utrecht JUG on October 14th, hosted by AXXES. Join us for an evening full of AI, practical insights, great conversations, food, drinks, and plenty of opportunities to reconnect with fellow developers.
We’ll start the evening with food and drinks before diving into our first session, where Urs Peters presents Eval Driven Development: Why You Need It to Make Your Agentic Application Survive Production. Agentic applications bring powerful new capabilities, but their probabilistic nature also introduces new risks; from hallucinations and context drift to unexpected behavior in multi-step workflows. In this talk, Urs will show how Eval-Driven Development brings an engineering approach to making these systems more reliable, using the Java/Kotlin eval framework Dokimos and real-world examples with Spring AI, LangChain4J, and Koog.
After the break, Sander Hoogendoorn takes us behind the scenes at iBOOD with Seven Habits of a (Mostly) Agentic Team. What happens when buyers build prototypes, marketing creates dashboards, and AI agents write most of the code? Sander shares how his small tech team has adapted its way of working: no Scrum, no sprints, no product owner, no pull requests, and no human code reviews. Instead, they focus on short feedback cycles, pragmatic prioritization, microteams, continuous delivery, and a set of guard rails that let different people work with different agent setups. He’ll share the seven habits that work for his team and what might or might not work for yours.s.
Please join us and RSVP!
Because of the limited number of seats, please keep your RSVP up-to-date, so we can welcome someone else if you can't make it.
Timeschedule
17:30 Doors open
18:00 Food & Drinks
18:45 Eval Driven Development: Why you need it to make your Agentic Application survive Production, by Urs Peters
19:45 Break
20:00 Seven Habits of a (Mostly) Agentic Team by Sander Hoogendoorn
21:00 Drinks
Giveaway
1 JetBrains licence
Talks
Eval Driven Development: Why you need it to make your Agentic Application survive Production
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 - using the (only?) full-fledged Java/Kotlin Eval framework: Dokimos. We’ll dive into techniques, tools, and patterns needed to make evals a first-class citizen of your development process—demonstrating all of these in a real-world application built with AI frameworks like Spring-AI, LanchChain4J, and Koog.
Along the way, you will learn how to:
- Design layered eval suites
- Create golden datasets
- Define rubrics and scoring criteria
- Extract eval signals from agent traces
- Use regression gates to detect degraded behavior after changes
- Build a continuous eval loop
Evaluation-Driven Development is the only path forward for reliable, smart next-generation applications. Let's learn how to walk it - together!
Seven Habits of a (Mostly) Agentic Team; When buyers build prototypes and marketing builds dashboards, the role of tech changes
iBOOD is not OpenAI or Google. It is a regular-sized e-commerce company with a small tech team and a business that moves fast. Two years ago the question was whether the team should use AI for coding at all. Today nobody writes code by hand anymore. Marketing builds its own dashboards. Buyers vibe code prototypes. And tech has a different job than before.
The conversation between business and tech has changed. It no longer starts with a requirement and ends with a hand-off. It starts with a working prototype that is untested and ill-secured, and it ends with business and tech figuring out together what should survive and how. More agentic, yes. But developing software is still a team sport.
In this talk Sander shares how his team at iBOOD actually works. Agile isn’t dead. The frameworks are. So no Scrum, no sprints, no product owner, no pull requests, and no human code reviews. Instead, extremely short cycles. An idea mostly reaches production in about four hours, because the shorter the cycle, the sooner the feedback. Different people run different agent setups within the same guard rails.
Sander has distilled what works into seven agentic habits, from prioritizing pragmatically and killing complexity to building microteams, delivering value continuously, and never forgetting to have fun. Some of it will apply to your context. Some of it won’t. Here is what worked for one team.
Speakers
Urs Peters
Urs Peter Senior Software Engineer and JetBrains certified Kotlin Trainer
Urs is a seasoned software engineer, solution architect, conference speaker, and trainer with over 25 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 Kotlin and Scala language courses, agentic AI courses for the JVM platform, Claude Coding courses, and architectural training sessions 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 and Claude Certified Architect.
Sander Hoogendoorn
Sander Hoogendoorn is an independent dad, avid traveler, and lifelong software developer. Coding since 1978, he still ships code every day — because once a developer, always a developer.
Currently CTO at iBOOD, he has led technology at several companies over the past decade and was once Capgemini's global agile thought leader. But don't expect corporate buzzwords: Sander is known for cutting through the fluff with a post-agile mindset and a healthy disregard for outdated best practices.
He helps teams and organizations break the rules that need breaking — replacing heavyweight processes with lightweight thinking, and agile dogma with actual flow. If something's slowing your team down, chances are he's already ranted about it in a keynote.
Onstage, he brings code, stories, and sharp insights on disruption, continuous delivery, microservices, monads (yes, really), software architecture, and the lost art of writing beautiful code. Fast-paced, thought-provoking, and never just theory.
Sander believes in small steps, critical thinking, and building stuff that works. No silver bullets. Just better software, made by better teams.
