Amsterdam Java User Group

Amsterdam JUG + More: Agentic AI in the Wild

16 sep 2026 17:00 CEST

Adyen, Simon Carmiggeltstraat 6 - 50, 1011 DJ Amsterdam, Netherlands, Amsterdam, NH, NL

This meetup will be hosted by Adyen, in their office at Simon Carmiggeltstraat 6 - 50, 1011 DJ Amsterdam.

⚠️ IMPORTANT: Please bring a valid ID document with you. You’ll need it to enter the building ⚠️

AI agents are moving into production. The question is no longer whether to use them, but whether you can trust what they ship.
​
This AGNTCon PreDay meetup brings together security researchers, developer advocates, and platform engineers integrating AI agents into real codebases, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native systems.

​Hosted by:

• Amsterdam Java User Group
• Dutch Cloud Native & AI Community Group
• Codex Community
• Qodo Dev Community
• AI Security Engineers Community

​The evening focuses on conversations that rarely fit into conference talks:

• what breaks when an agent has write access to your dependencies,
• how to encode your team's standards into machine-readable guardrails
• what changes when agentic systems run at cloud-native scale

​Under the theme Security, Quality, and Scale, we'll explore agentic supply-chain risk, AI-powered code review, and Java and cloud-native's evolving role in agentic systems.
​
No vendor pitches. Just practical lessons from systems running in production.

​AGENDA

• 18:00 – Doors Open, Drinks and Networking
• 18:30 – Welcome and Opening Remarks
• 18:40 – Nnenna Ndukwe, Developer Relations, Qodo
• 19:00 – Break, Food and Networking
• 19:15 – Panel: Agentic AI in the Wild (details below)
• 19:55 – Break, Food and Networking
• 20:10 – Liran Tal, Senior Director, Developer Relations, Snyk
• 20:30 – Speaker TBA
• 20:50 – Closing Remarks

​SPEAKERS

• Liran Tal – Senior Director, Developer Relations, Snyk
• Nnenna Ndukwe – Developer Relations, Qodo
• Surprise speaker – TBA

​PANEL
AGENTIC AI IN THE WILD What does it take to move AI agents from proof of concept into systems that operate reliably? Practitioners from across the technology stack will discuss context management, governance, production workflows, failure modes, and what changes when agentic systems scale. Expect concrete lessons, not talking points.

• ​Moderator: Dana Fine
• Panelists:
• Brian Vermeer (Java Community),
• Carlos Mestre del Pin (Microsoft),
• Alessandro Stefouli-Vozza (Cloud Native Community),
• Speaker TBA (OpenAI)

Amsterdam JUG Meetup at Picnic

24 sep 2026 18:00 CEST

Picnic HQ, Van Marwijk Kooystraat 15, 1114 AG Amsterdam, Netherlands, Amsterdam, NH, NL

Join in with the latest Amsterdam JUG Meetup at Picnic HQ, Van Marwijk Kooystraat 15, 1114 AG Amsterdam.

Agenda

• 17:30 – Doors Open (and food!)
• 18:00 – 18:45 – "Keynote: Engineering-led innovation: Building the future with technology" by Daniel Gebler, Picnic CTO
• 18:45 – 19:00 Small Break
• 19:00 – 19:45 - "Part 1: The Gray Factory" by Victor Rentea
• 19:45 – 20:00 Small Break
• 20:00 – 20:45 - "Part 2: Career Reconversion to Agentic Engineer" by Victor Rentea
• 21:00 The End

Abstracts

"Keynote: Engineering-led innovation: Building the future with technology" by Daniel Gebler, Picnic CTO

In this keynote, Daniel Gebler (CTO of Picnic) will share the story of Picnic moving from MvP to Scale Up to where it is today, while highlighting some typical technical leadership dilemmas.

"Part 1: The Gray Factory" by Victor Rentea

The most agentified engineering teams of my clients are all converging towards the same workflow, aiming to optimize the code review step while preventing human cognitive debt and skill erosion.

This talk summarizes their practices, teaching actionable steps and milestones to gradually improve the quality of AI-generated code up to a point in which you can safely start decreasing the code review ‘intensity’.

Dark Factories are not built ground up - instead, lights are responsibly dimmed, then turned off one by one, area by area, after observing impeccable code produced consistently.

"Part 2: Career Reconversion to Agentic Engineer" by Victor Rentea

• Identity crisis - who are we?
• Mandatory mindset changes
• What makes a good Agentic Engineer?
• Job Interviews - what matters?
• Skill Erosion
• Team structures
• Cognitive Debt (former Tech Debt)
• Agentic Worklife Calisthenics
• Fastest Reconversion Path
• Helping the Skeptics

Bios

• Daniel Gebler builds the systems that power modern retail and grocery logistics at Picnic. As CTO, he leads the engineering teams responsible for scaling the company’s infrastructure and shaping the technical strategy behind online shopping. His recent work focuses heavily on the practical applications of artificial intelligence in retail.

• Victor Rentea is a Java Champion with extensive experience in training mid-senior developer groups (5000+ developers of 100+ companies). During these intense workshops, Victor gets to debate with very bright engineers about the challenges faced by their projects. Discover how Victor can help you at https://victorrentea.ro: training catalog, consultancy, and YouTube channel.

Amsterdam JUG OTel Workshop at Dash0

30 sep 2026 18:00 CEST

Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal 162, Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal 162, 1012 SJ Amsterdam, Netherlands, Amsterdam, NH, NL

Join in with the latest Amsterdam JUG Workshop at Dash0 (which is at Dash0, Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal 162/Suite 401, 1012SJ Amsterdam), in which we learn all the basic principles of OpenTelemetry, while eating pizza, (and celebrating Yoeri Krom's birthday).

Note:

• Bring Your own laptop because this is a hands-on workshop where you'll be learning about OpenTelemetry from scratch!
• Limited seats, exclusive workshop, sign up quick!

Agenda

17:30 — Doors Open (and Food and Drinks)
18:00–18:20 — OpenTelemetry for Complete Beginners (Part 1).
18:20–18:50 — OpenTelemetry for Complete Beginners (Part 2).
18:50–19:20 — Hands on Lab 1: Instrumenting a demo app.
19:20–19:35 — Break.
19:35–20:10 — Hands on Lab 2: From data to answers.
20:10–20:40 — Hands on Lab 3: Break things on purpose.
20:40–21:00 — Wrap-up.

Details on Labs

Lab 1: Instrument a demo app. Add OpenTelemetry to a small service from scratch: SDK, auto-instrumentation, and a collector. You'll send the resulting traces, metrics, and logs into a demo environment so you can see what your instrumentation actually produces.

Lab 2: From data to answers. With telemetry flowing, we'll work through real questions: which service is slow, why, and what changed. The environment that we set up in Lab 1 is our workbench, but the techniques (correlating traces with logs, reading resource attributes, querying by semantic conventions) apply to any OTel-compatible backend.

Lab 3: Break things on purpose. Introduce latency, errors, and a misbehaving dependency into the demo app, while tracing the failure back to its cause using only what OTel gives you. The goal is to see how much of a real incident you can reconstruct from the signals, using the demo environment to check whether your diagnosis continues to makes sense.

Amsterdam JUG Meetup at Mollie

05 okt 2026 18:00 CEST

Mollie, Keizersgracht 126, 1015 CW Amsterdam, Netherlands, Amsterdam, NH, NL

Join in with the latest Amsterdam JUG Meetup at Mollie, Keizersgracht 126, in central Amsterdam.

Agenda:

17:30: Doors open (and food)
18:00 - 18:45 - Talk 1: "Your Spring Boot Production is Bleeding. Let's Fix That." -- Mikhail Polivakha
18:45 - 19:30 - Talk 2: "Building Scalable, Low-Latency Fraud Detection AI in Java" -- Zoran Sevarac
19:30 - 20:15 - Talk 3: "Breaking the Monolith: Learnings from a Year of Improvements" -- Murat Özkan
20:15 - 21:00 - Talk 4: "HTTP: How Teenagers Talk to Their Parents" -- Hanno Embregts

Abstracts:

Talk 1: "Your Spring Boot Production is Bleeding. Let's Fix That." -- Mikhail Polivakha

The Java community shares a stack: Spring, Hibernate, Spring Data, Jackson. And with it a set of best practices we hear on repeat:

• Disable Open Session in View in production
• Avoid N+1, EAGER fetching, Cascade.REMOVE on collections
• Adopt Project Leyden and Lilliput and so on.

We know the rules by heart. But who checks that every service in the fleet actually follows them? In this talk, I will introduce Axelix, an OSS toolkit that closes that gap for Spring Boot ecosystems.

A lightweight starter plus a build-system plugin discovers each service's misconfigurations, persistence anti-patterns, and JVM improvement opportunities, then streams them to the Axelix Master - a single monitoring view, fleet-wide and per service.

We will go from a bare app to actionable insight live and see how Axelix exposes the opportunities to fix the findings to AI Agents via a built-in MCP server.

Talk 2: "Building Scalable, Low-Latency Fraud Detection AI in Java" -- Zoran Sevarac

For modern payment platforms, fraud detection is not only a machine learning problem — it is a business-critical capability. As transaction volumes grow, payment providers need to detect risk effectively while maintaining fast payment processing, controlling infrastructure costs, and scaling without adding unnecessary operational complexity.

In this session, we’ll show how an end-to-end fraud detection pipeline can be built entirely in Java — from transaction ingestion and feature processing to machine learning inference and fraud scoring.

Using payment fraud detection as a practical use case, we’ll examine the engineering decisions that directly affect business outcomes: how to increase transaction-processing capacity, maintain predictable low latency, reduce infrastructure overhead, simplify integration, and scale fraud detection cost-effectively as payment volumes grow.

Talk 3: "Breaking the Monolith: Learnings from a Year of Improvements" -- Murat Özkan

After a year of effort reducing the complexity of a 15-year-old monolithic codebase at Miro, we are back to share our learnings, both technical and
organizational. Organizational challenges often get overlooked, but they are critical for success at scale.

On the organizational side, we will discuss some "controversial" topics, such as the value of modularization, building and keeping sponsorship, prioritizing by impact, and the role of standards and observability. Without those, this project wouldn't have got past a personal hobby.

On the technical side, we will talk about some patterns that caused tight coupling in the codebase over the years, and how we detect and remove them without disrupting day-to-day development. That includes the role of agents in the trenches.

This talk is for any developer, team lead, or architect trying to improve a codebase that is too big to fix alone.

Talk 4: "HTTP: How Teenagers Talk to Their Parents" -- Hanno Embregts

As a parent, I’ve often found that getting a straight answer from a teenager can feel like an exercise in debugging. This realisation led me to discover the surprisingly close parallels between navigating those conversations and understanding HTTP status codes.

This talk won’t be about parenting (though there will be anecdotes!), but rather about decoding the language that modern systems use to communicate – success, failure, and everything in between.

We’ll explore common HTTP status codes, their implications for developers, testers, architects, and anyone who works with data, and discover how these codes can help us troubleshoot problems, build more resilient applications, and perhaps even understand the often-mysterious responses we receive from the teenagers in our lives.