Boosting Developer Effectiveness & Introduction to Vector Databases

We are happy and proud to announce our first meetup in 2024!

This time Rick Ossendrijver wil learn us how we can Boost Developer effectiveness with a Java Platform Team & Alexander Chatzizacharias will give us a fun and absurd introduction to Vector Databases.

The meetup will be hosted by CodeSquad.

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 of you can't make it.

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17:30 Doors open
18:00 Food & Drinks
19:00 Boosting developer effectiveness with a Java platform team, by Rick Ossendrijver
20:00 Break
20:15 A fun and absurd introduction to Vector Databases by Alexander Chatzizacharias
21:15 Drinks

Giveaways
1 JetBrains licence
1 print copy of The Definitive Guide to Security in Jakarte EE

Talks

Boosting developer effectiveness with a Java platform team

Maintaining a high-quality and uniform codebase poses significant challenges at scale, as ever-growing technical debt, inconsistencies, and weak dependency management can slip in too easily. This talk delves into how a dedicated Java Platform can tackle all these challenges by providing a centralized solution!

Picnic's Java Platform approach empowers a community of 300+ developers with a robust suite of tools and shared libraries. Instead of teams having to reinvent the wheel, developers can use out-of-the-box libraries for cross-cutting concerns such as logging, observability and security. This facilitates adherence to guidelines and enforces best practices. As a result, developers can sidestep the burden of creating repetitive and mundane implementations and focus on writing actual business logic.

Learn how to harness the power of automation to achieve consistency and standardization with continuous enhancement. We will discuss our tooling setup and practices. Gain insights into an approach of providing shared libraries, centralized Maven configuration, developer tools, and CI/CD practices. Come and learn how Picnic's developers are empowered to build Java services with efficiency, quality, and confidence.

A fun and absurd introduction to Vector Databases

Vector databases have emerged as an exciting new tech in the world of data storage. Unsurprisingly enough, they have become the go-to choice for storing vectors (who would have thought?!) and are widely used in conjunction with generative AI. Apart from their use in AI applications, they can also be extremely handy as search engines, especially if you are looking to implement natural language interfaces. If you're reading this and eager to harness the power of vector databases to bring your application to the next level, then this talk is tailor-made for you!

Whether you're an experienced database professional or an adventurous developer seeking fresh perspectives, Alexander will guide you through the process of getting started with a Vector Database. He will demonstrate how to translate your data into vectors and master the art of querying that data. From text search to image search to generative search, Alexander's goal is to provide an engaging introduction to Vector Databases and, hopefully, inspire you to explore their full potential.

Speakers

Rick Ossendrijver

Rick Ossendrijver is a Software Engineer at Picnic, a fast-growing online supermarket. He is part of the Java Platform team, which supports over 300 engineers within the company. Rick is a committer and enthusiast of the Error Prone project. Moreover, he is passionate about improving software quality through static analysis and automation, and works on Picnic's open-source Error Prone Support project.

Alexander Chatzizacharias

Alexander is a 33-year old Software Engineer at jDriven. He is of Dutch/Greek nationality. Alexander has a bachelor in Game Development (University of applied sciences of Amsterdam) and a master in Game studies (University of Amsterdam).

During his master Alexander developed a passion for gamification and software engineering. One of Alexanders career goals is bringing game development and software engineering closer together. He believes that both industries can learn a lot from each other, and is continuously trying to mix technologies and methodologies from both fields.