Creating effective and objective ADRs && Making Sense of Vector Databases

We're excited to announce our next meetup August 5th, 2025! As usual, we'll take care of food, drinks and awesome sessions - you just need to bring you ;-)

This meetup will feature two talks aimed at (Java) developers:

• Piet van Dongen will kick off with insights on creating and communicating architectural decision records with your teams
• Then, after Balkrishna's talk you will never look te same at vectors anymore as he demystifies vector databases.

All sessions will be presented in English; RSVP now for an evening of learning and fun!
The meetup will be at the OpenValue office in Utrecht (directions: https://route.openvalue.eu), enough free parking spaces available.

Agenda
17:30 Walk in
18:00 Food
18:30 Talk 1 (see below)
19:30 Break
19:45 Talk 2 (see below)
20:45 Drinks

First talk: Creating effective and objective architectural decision records (ADRs)
Documenting decisions is like eating your veggies as a kid: they keep telling you it’s good for you, but you just hate doing it. Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) to the rescue! ADRs are perfect for just-in-time, just-enough documentation for engineering teams and organisations.

During this talk, you will learn how to make create and communicate architectural decisions as a team, in barely any time at all.

About Piet:
Piet is a senior cloud-native software engineering consultant at OpenValue. He loves to help organisations with mapping and exploiting business opportunities using software and cloud technology.

He shares his knowledge of software architecture, cloud modernisation, skills development, and technology by writing, lecturing, training, or speaking on stage at meetups and conferences like Voxxed Days, Codemotion, DevOpsDays, and re:Invent. He is an active software community member: he is one of the organizers of the Dutch iSAQB Software Architecture Community and an ex-leader of the Dutch AWS User Group.

Second talk: Making Sense of Vector Databases
Vector databases are quite a hot topic these days. From powering semantic search to recommendation systems and from anomaly detection to clustering, all of this can be achieved with vector databases. But how do they do this? Join this talk to find out.
We start with understanding what a vector is and create a simple example of how vectors can be used. Then we discuss new concepts around vectors and make the examples slightly more complex each time we add a new concept to it. Finally taking the examples to an incredibly amazing level!
All in all, this talk will explain what vectors are, how are they stored, what are embedding models, indexing algorithms and similarity/distance metrics with the help of interesting examples with increasing complexity that keeps you intrigued!

About Bala:
Balkrishna works as an Engineering Lead at ING Bank. He is also a frequent speaker at renowned tech conferences. He has passion for continuous learning and genuine desire to sharing knowledge. Although he has been working with Java for many years, he finds latest developments in Java quite exciting. In his free time, he enjoys playing chess. The analytical thinking and foresight used in chess is something he finds useful in software development.