Amsterdam JUG Meetup at Confluent/IBM

Join in with the latest Amsterdam JUG Meetup at IBM, Johan Huizingalaan 765, 1066 VH Amsterdam.

Agenda

18:00 - Doors Open
18:00 - 18:30 - Food/Drinks and networking
18:30 - 19:15 - The Missing Protocol: How MCP Bridges LLMs and Data Streams
—Viktor Gamov
19:15 - 20:00 - Bootiful Spring AI—Josh Long and James Ward
20:00 - 21:00 - Networking drinks

Abstracts

The Missing Protocol: How MCP Bridges LLMs and Data Streams
—Viktor Gamov

Nobody’s talking about this: MCP isn’t just another way to build chatbots. It’s the bridge we’ve been missing between AI reasoning and real-time data systems.

Teams build AI applications that work great in demos but fall apart with production data. Your agents analyze historical reports but can’t tell what’s happening in your Kafka streams. They’re blind to schema changes and disconnected from events that matter to your business. Instead of treating streaming platforms like black boxes, you expose them directly to your agents via MCP protocol. Suddenly, your AI doesn’t just read about data—it lives inside your data flows.

Learn what becomes possible when you stop thinking about AI as an external service and start treating it as part of your streaming architecture. We’ll build systems where agents subscribe to real-time events, reason about evolving schemas, and make decisions that ripple through your data platform.

Bootiful Spring AI—Josh Long and James Ward

The age of artificial intelligence (because the search for regular intelligence hasn't gone well..) is nearly at hand, and it's everywhere! But is it in your application? It should be. AI is about integration, and here the Java and Spring communities come second to nobody.

In this talk, we'll demystify the concepts of modern day Artificial Intelligence and look at its integration with the white hot new Spring AI project, a framework that builds on the richness of Spring Boot to extend them to the wide world of AI engineering.

Bios

Viktor Gamov is a Principal Developer Advocate at Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka®. With a rich background in implementing and advocating for distributed systems and cloud-native architectures, Viktor excels in open-source technologies. He is passionate about helping architects, developers, and operators craft systems that are not only low-latency and scalable but also highly available.As a Java Champion and esteemed speaker, Viktor is known for his insightful presentations at top industry events such as JavaOne, Devoxx, Kafka Summit, and QCon. His expertise spans distributed systems, real-time data streaming, JVM, and DevOps. Viktor has co-authored “Enterprise Web Development” and “Apache Kafka® in Action”. Follow Viktor on X - @gamussa to stay updated with Viktor’s latest thoughts on technology, his gym and food adventures, and insights into open-source and developer advocacy.

Josh Long (@starbuxman) has been the first Spring Developer Advocate since 2010. Josh is a Java Champion, author of 7 books (including "Reactive Spring") and numerous best-selling video training (including "Building Microservices with Spring Boot Livelessons" with Spring Boot co-founder Phil Webb), and an open-source contributor (Spring Boot, Spring Integration, Axon, Spring Cloud, Activiti, Vaadin, etc), a Youtuber (Coffee + Software with Josh Long as well as my Spring Tips series ), and a podcaster ("A Bootiful Podcast").

James Ward is a Professional software developer since 1997, with much of that time spent helping developers build software that doesn't suck. A Typed Pure Functional Programming zealot who often compromises on his ideals to just get stuff done. Currently a Developer Advocate for AWS.