Reflections on JCrete 2025
As software developers, we often underestimate how much our profession demands not just from our minds, but from our bodies.
We sit for long hours, our necks bent toward screens, our shoulders tense from deadlines, production incidents, or endless streams of communication. Over time, the toll is both physical and mental — and you can feel it.
At JCrete 2025, one session addressed this head-on: chair yoga for developers, led by Sofía Puerta, a mindfulness-based reduction instructor. She reminded us that productivity starts with well-being. Through grounding exercises, posture correction, and mindful breathing, Sofía showed how we can reset in the middle of the workday. More than just relaxation, it’s a way of cultivating the clarity needed to stay present through coding, debugging, or meetings.
That theme — clarity fueling productivity — became a thread running through many of the sessions I attended.
Java and AI: Tools That Empower #
Immediately after talking about our mental tools, it seemed fitting to turn to our technical ones. Zoran Sevarac led a discussion on Java and AI, centered on how the JVM can evolve into a true high-performance platform for AI and deep learning.
Traditionally, the AI world revolves around Python, but new projects like Panama (Vector API, Foreign Function & Memory API, jextract) and Valhalla are opening possibilities to make Java just as competitive while keeping its advantages in scalability, security, and performance. Putting AI into production in large, distributed systems directly on the JVM would be a game-changer.
I then remembered this discussion when I heard later what Alex Buckley, Java Specification Leader, shared with his peers. They have no shortage of experts writing code. They lack developers trying out the new features and providing useful feedback. And useful feedback is factual, specific, reproducible information, like I tried this feature as currently implemented in this build. And here’s what worked and here’s what didn’t work.
Communities: Growing Together #
That theme of engagement came front and center in Mary Grygleski’s session on building and nurturing communities. Mary is not only a Java Champion but also a tireless advocate for bringing people together. In the session, we shared experiences about challenges facing Java User Groups (JUGs): finding venues post-COVID, attracting students, balancing speakers who might be technically brilliant but inexperienced at public speaking.
Some practical advice we collected: experiment with new platforms like luma for event organization, offer lightning talks to lower barriers, and remember that communities aren’t built by perfection, but by persistence. Mary also introduced us to an exciting AI Collective initiative, showing how new domains like AI are sparking community building across traditional Java circles.
This, too, ties back to well-being: productivity scales best not through lone effort, but by leaning on supportive communities that stretch us, sometimes push us.
State Machines: Distributed Systems #
From people and communities, we dove into distributed systems. Replicated state machines with James, and a follow-up on low-latency state machines with Peter, carried the same underlying theme: how to keep systems highly available and fault-tolerant.
Just as we humans need tools like yoga and mindfulness to remain steady, distributed systems need the right patterns: determinism where possible, careful replication strategies, and strategies to minimize latency. For example, in financial trading systems, the goal is radical performance — inputs processed within 20 milliseconds, outputs within 10 microseconds. And we were remembered on concepts like Little’s Law.
Balance and efficiency, whether in a developer’s posture or in a replicated cluster, are about finding consistent, repeatable flow under stress.
Dunning–Kruger and the Importance of Knowing #
Flow, however, also depends on awareness. In a lively discussion, we revisited the Dunning–Kruger effect: the paradox that the less a person knows, the more they overestimate what they do know. Peter Lawrey put it succinctly: The deeper your expertise, the more able you are to estimate what you don’t know.
It was a gentle but important reminder. Just like mindfulness requires self-awareness — technical mastery requires humility. Productivity improves when we stop pretending we know it all and instead embrace feedback, just as in the context of new Java features.
Future-Ready Creativity: The Data-Native Approach #
Finally, I want to circle back to a session idea I proposed but there were too many strong concurrents: What is a data-native approach?
At another conference, Outlier 2025, Gabriele Rossi explained his thoughts and vision on the future of data visualization. Some data visualization tools are getting so intuitive that creating charts is becoming second nature for many professionals. The technical barrier that once made our expertise essential is falling. But this is not necessarily bad news. It’s evolution. Rossi argued that we’re moving from being data visualization specialists to becoming data-native designers. Instead of just making visualizations, we’re designing entire systems and experiences shaped by data. Visualization becomes just one ingredient in a much richer recipe.
This is a topic I wish to explore more in the context of software engineering, data science and data visualization.
The ultimate step in our arc: from well-being to productivity to creativity. Well-being gives us the clarity to work, productivity ensures we can deliver at scale, and creativity allows us to reimagine what’s possible.
Closing Thoughts #
JCrete 2025 reminded me that being a developer is about far more than just code. It’s about tending to your body and mind, mastering the evolving toolbox of our trade, building communities that sustain us, designing resilient systems, and maintaining humility in what we know and don’t know.
The creativity of tomorrow — whether in AI on the JVM, in data-native systems, or in new human-centered communities — starts with that foundation. And just like in yoga, it begins with taking a breath, grounding yourself, and choosing to be present.
I’m immensely grateful to Mary, Sofía and Heinz for taking the time and patience to record short videos with me:
YT link to Building Communities with Mary Grygleski
YT link to Mindfulness for Developers: Hack the Stress
The mind behind JCrete, Heinz Kabutz, sharing what you might not have known about JCrete and about the Java Specialists’ Newsletter: