Quarkus at JChampionsConf 2026

[insectengine]

Event Description: Java Champions are developers from around the world who are recognized for the contributions to the Java community. Champions are about sharing their knowledge with developers. This coming January, after successful conferences for the past five years, will be our sixth conference organized by Champions and featuring Champions in the presentations.

Date: Thur 1/22/2026, Fri 1/23/2026, Mon 1/26/2026, and Tues 1/27/2026.
Event Type: Virtual

https://jchampionsconf.com/index.html

Sessions

Session: Ahead of time, the final frontier
Speaker(s): María Arias de Reyna Dominguez & Andrew Dinn
Date/Time: TBD
Abstract: There are many initiatives inside the OpenJDK that are revolutionizing the way our Java applications behave. Project Leyden accelerates peak performance by improving ahead of time caching. But, do you know how to use it with your application?

On this session we will discuss what Leyden is, what is the state of art of the ahead of time cache, and showcase a few examples. We will prove (with potential demo effect!) that Leyden decreases warm-up time, and present the tools you can use to optimize your application!

Session: Six and a half ridiculous things to do with Quarkus
Speaker(s): Holly Cummins
Date/Time: TBD
Abstract: Let’s abuse the tools! Everyone knows Quarkus is computationally efficient, expressive, and rock-solid for production. But did you know that we can use Quarkus efficiency to build applications that shouldn’t go anywhere near production? In this demo-driven session, Holly will put the joy into “developer joy”. She’ll show you all sorts of things you can do with Quarkus that you probably shouldn’t: - Build an LLM-powered app that’s guaranteed to hallucinate, because you can do more than you think with guardrails, and truth is so boring - Write your business code in rockstarlang, because everything should be a hair metal ballad - Use Minecraft as your observability client, because the LGTM stack doesn’t have enough explosions - Write a CLI for generating memes faster, because everything is better on the command-line - Benchmark an application against a grapefruit, because metric units aren’t tasty Business value? Learning? If you insist. As well as absurd demos, you’ll leave this session with a deeper understanding of how to get the most out of Quarkus and Java. There will be Quarkus best practices, powerful integrations, and nifty use cases alongside the silly explosions and grapefruit.

Session: Non-deterministic? No problem! You can test it!
Speaker(s): Eric Deandrea
Date/Time: TBD
Abstract: Testing is hard, which is why developers tend to avoid it. Testing non-deterministic things is even harder, which is unfortunate, since we're all writing AI-infused applications, and AI models are notoriously non-deterministic. What happens when the applications start using advanced features, such as RAG, tools, and agents? How do you test these applications? There must be some tools, technologies, and practices out there that can help, while not costing your organization lots of money!

Join Java Champions Oleg & Eric in this session as they explore some of these tools & technologies, such as Testcontainers, LangChain4j, Quarkus, and Ollama. They’ll bring together Oleg’s Testcontainers knowledge and Eric’s testing obsessions, getting hands-on and show how you can incorporate these tools and technologies into your inner and outer loop processes.

You’ll see how effortlessly Quarkus integrates with Testcontainers, and how Testcontainers can be used in conjunction with popular LLMs when writing tests. You’ll also learn about how to use containers to extend your testing into your CI environments, so you can always be sure that if your tests are green you’re good to go!