LJC Meetup at Capital One

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About this event

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

Join us on 26th February 2026 for a London Java Community meetup hosted at Capital One. This event brings together practitioners exploring what it means to build modern, cloud‑native platforms and work effectively with AI‑powered development tools.

As cloud adoption matures and AI coding agents become embedded in engineering workflows, this evening focuses on two critical themes: architecting for cloud‑native efficiency and leveraging AI agents more effectively in real‑world development.

Talk 1 – Tom Clifford‑Clarke, Lead Software Development Engineer at Capital One
Keeping our heads in the cloud, using AI agents on the ground

Many organisations operate entirely in the cloud — but far fewer are truly cloud‑native. As architectures evolve and AI becomes a core concern, the gap between “running in the cloud” and “optimising for it” becomes increasingly costly.

Tom explores why robust architectural patterns and standards are non‑negotiable today. Drawing on Capital One’s journey, he’ll cover practical approaches to Event‑Driven Architecture, serverless adoption, and service cataloguing strategies that unlock scalability, efficiency, and AI readiness — while improving the developer experience.

Talk 2 – Simon Maple, Founding Head of Developer Relations at Tessl
Working Effectively with AI Coding Agents

AI coding agents are becoming a permanent part of the developer toolkit — but it’s easy to misuse them or not realise their full potential.
This session gives hands‑on guidance for working with AI agents in a more deliberate and productive way. Simon covers how to manage agent context, apply reasoning depth effectively, and shape agent behaviour through structured prompts, compaction strategies, sub‑agents, commands, and hooks.

Using examples from popular tools like Cursor, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and Codex, you’ll gain a clearer mental model of how these agents behave, where they excel, and practical techniques you can use in everyday workflows.

Speaker Bios

Tom Clifford‑Clarke
Lead Software Development Engineer at Capital One. Tom’s background spans large‑scale corporate software, end‑user products, and custom delivery tooling. He now focuses on cloud productivity engineering — improving developer experience and enabling teams to build high‑quality software at a sustainable pace.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tbc2/

Simon Maple
Founding Head of Developer Relations at Tessl and former VP of Developer Relations at Snyk, ZeroTurnaround, and IBM. A Java Champion, JavaOne Rockstar speaker, Duke’s Choice Award winner, and co‑leader of the London Java Community, Simon specialises in developer productivity, tooling, and community leadership.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonmaple/

Huge thanks to our friends at Capital One for sponsoring this event and supporting our Community.

This event is organised by RecWorks on behalf of the London Java Community.

The London Java Community is sponsored by Hazelcast, Neo4j, Redis, and Discover