Kotlin & Java Kickoff 2026: WebAssembly & Spring Boot 4

Let’s kick off the year with some talks in collaboration with the Java and Friends meetup group.
Fresh topics, shared knowledge and a strong community vibe.

===Topic===
1st talk: WebAssembly
If you have been living under a rock like me and have heard about WebAssembly but don't really know what it does, then this talk is right for you! WebAssembly is one of the biggest standardization efforts in modern computing and we will have a look at how it works, why you should care, and why big players like Microsoft, Intel, and the CNCF alike have a vested interest to push it further. Did you know that Kotlin is implementing a wasm backend, so we can run Kotlin code without the JVM?
What once started out as a browser hack to make javascript faster is slowly but steadily growing into a new computing substrate, and finally, a common architecture and compilation target for our programs. It's write once, run everywhere, but hopefully for real this time.
Oh and it will also replace docker. And Kubernetes.
Okay, I am overdramatizing. I swear my takes are not as biased as this introduction but you will have to listen to my talk to find out.
Speaker: Florian Schindler

2nd talk: Spring Boot 4 with Kotlin: Modern Spring Development, Refined
Spring Boot 4 raises the bar for modern development in the JVM ecosystem, and Kotlin fits it perfectly. This talk highlights what’s new in Spring Boot 4 and how Kotlin helps you build cleaner, safer, and more concise applications with less boilerplate and better defaults.
Speaker: Marián Varga

===Schedule===
18:00 - Doors open
18:30 - Welcome by Erste Bank, Kotlin Vienna & and SQUER
18:40 - First talk
19:25 - Break
19:35 - Second talk
20:20 - Pizza, Drinks & Networking

===How to find us===
Canetti Tower - Erste Group, Canettistraße 5, 1100 Wien