The SolutionFactory to Java's Problems & GenAI/LLM programming with langchain4j

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
IMPORTANT!!! Access to the VodafoneZiggo office is only possible by means of a QR code that VodafoneZiggo sends to you by e-mail before the start of the meetup. For this we need your e-mail address. Therefore, please enter your e-mail address when you RSVP. Unfortunately, you cannot participate in the meetup without a QR code. Your e-mail address will not be used for any other purposes.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We are happy and proud to announce our next meetup!

This time Nicolai Parlog wil learn us how Project Amber was set up to tackle some persistent pain points in Java and Oleg Šelajev will show us how to use langchain4j, the Open-Source Java variant of the popular LLM framework langchain, together with Ollama as a local LLM model runtime, to create a local development experience for building GenAI application.

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.

===

17:30 Doors open
18:00 Food & Drinks
19:00 The SolutionFactory to Java's Problems, by Nicolai Parlog
20:00 Break
20:15 Learning GenAI/LLM programming with langchain4j and testcontainers by Oleg Šelajev
21:15 Drinks

Giveaways
1 JetBrains licence

Talks

The SolutionFactory to Java's Problems

Java has issues! Verbose, cumbersome, no expressiveness, no fun. (Or so the kids say.)

Jokes and the craving for syntax sugar aside, Java does have some persistent pain points and Project Amber was set up to tackle them. Not as a single solution to a narrow problem, but as a solution factory that’s steadily and carefully chipping away at them:

• text blocks and interpolation to untie the knots in dealing with strings
• pattern matching, records, and sealed types against the clunkiness of operating on data
• var, records, and destructuring to reduce redundancy in variable and type declarations
• a relaxed launch protocol to pave the on-ramp for Java beginners

We’ll look at these features individually and how they play together to make Java more expressive, more succinct, and more readable. After this talk, you’ll know how Project Amber drove and drives the evolution of the language

Learning GenAI/LLM programming with langchain4j and testcontainers

GenAI and LLMs are currently a big hype topic within the IT industry and beyond. And while we should always be critical about “The next big thing” style hype waves, we also need to stay curious and make up our own mind. And how to better understand a technology as a developer, than by using it in practice?

In this talk, we want to look at how to use langchain4j, the Open-Source Java variant of the popular LLM framework langchain, together with Ollama as a local LLM model runtime, to create a local development experience for building GenAI applications. And to top things off, we will utilize Testcontainers’ infrastructure-as-code capabilities to set up this LLM development environment on demand and without requiring manual fiddling around.

Speakers

Nicolai Parlog

Nicolai (aka nipafx) is a Java enthusiast focused on language features, core APIs, and runtime evolution with a passion for learning and sharing. He does that mostly at conferences and in his biweekly Inside Java Newscast, but also occasionally in live streams, articles, and books – more on all that on nipafx.dev. He’s a Java Developer Advocate at Oracle and otherwise best known for his haircut.

Oleg Šelajev

Oleg Šelajev is a developer advocate at Docker working mainly on developer productivity, Testcontainers, and improving how we set up local development environments and tests. Developer. Author. Speaker. Java Champion. Docker captain. Loves all languages.