From Elliptic Curves to Deploying on Friday Afternoons

This meetup will be hosted by IKEA, in their office, Ingka Group Digital Hub (Amshult) Danzigerkade 15B, 1013 AP Amsterdam.

Note: After 18:30, IKEA's doors will close (this is from the building, we cannot change it unfortunately) so make sure to arrive before then.

Agenda

17:30 Doors open, food and drinks, and welcome to IKEA!

18:00 Cameron Harris (IKEA) presenting “Virtual Threads”

18:45 Break

19:00 Erwin Manders (Rabobank) presenting “Elliptic Curve Cryptography Unleashed: Faster, Smaller, Stronger”

19:45 Break

20:00 Bas Stoker (independent contractor) presenting “Deploying On Friday Afternoons Without Stress”

20:45 End

Information about the talks:

Title: "Virtual Threads"

This presentation examines concurrency challenges in high-performance servers, from the C10K problem and the resource costs of traditional OS (platform) threads to the complexity of asynchronous/reactive models (event loops, callbacks, futures, async/await).

It introduces JEP 425 as Java’s modern take on green threading, enabling the simple thread-per-request style at massive scale by:

• storing compact, growable stack chunks on the heap,
• automatically suspending virtual threads during blocking I/O via non-blocking OS calls,
• scheduling them on a small pool of carrier (platform) threads.

The talk highlights memory efficiency, garbage-collection interaction, debugging support, scheduler design considerations, and some library compatibility notes, positioning virtual threads as a compelling alternative to both heavyweight OS threads and user-space reactive programming in Java.

About Cameron Harris. Cameron is a Senior Software Engineer and tech enthusiast originating from Cape Town, South Africa. Passionate about building software that improves everyday life, he specializes in distributed systems, high-performance computing, event-driven architectures, and hardware integration. His key interest lies in programming techniques that increase the safety, fault tolerance and performance of code delivered throughout the SDLC.

Title: "Elliptic Curve Cryptography Unleashed: Faster, Smaller, Stronger"

In a digital world overflowing with AI‑generated voices, deepfakes, and synthetic identities, one question rises above the noise: how can we still trust anything we read or receive? When every message could be fabricated and every sender could be an illusion, authenticity becomes a battlefield?

This talk dives into the cryptographic machinery that keeps that battlefield from collapsing. You’ll discover how asymmetric key cryptography lets us verify a sender’s identity without ever touching their secrets, and how a simple pair of cryptographic keys can anchor trust in a chaotic information landscape.

We’ll explore the elegance of elliptic‑curve cryptography, the hidden dangers of weak randomness, and the looming challenge of post‑quantum algorithms that threaten to upend everything we rely on today.

If you want to understand how digital trust survives in an era of manufactured reality, this is where the story begins.

About Erwin Manders. Erwin is a Solution Architect in the Online Access Management area of Tribe Digital Platform at Rabobank. He has been an architect for several years with hands-on experience as a Java developer and is certified as an architect in the ArchiMate framework. Erwin works primarily on Identity Management, Access Control, Data Integrity & Cryptography.

Title: “Deploying On Friday Afternoons Without Stress”

Keep deploying to production, and without stress? But in an environment where high availability is key, that's not as easy as it sounds… Because is monitoring alone really enough to head into the weekend with peace of mind? How do you safeguard quality while wanting to automatically deploy every PR to production? Also a bit tired of the simple tutorials explaining how to test, where the examples look nothing like your own project?

Then this session is really for you! In this case study of a real and non-trivial project at NS (Dutch Railways), I want to show you how we managed to pull that off, and how we leveraged modern tools like Testcontainers and Microsoft Playwright.

About Bas Stoker. Bas is a Senior Full Stack developer with a focus on Java and React. Main interests that unite both worlds are creating nice customer experiences and QA-topics and associated tooling and best practices, e.g. Testcontainers and Docker-based deployments like Kubernetes.