James Ward

James Ward

Biography

James Ward is a nerd / software developer who shares what he learns with others though presentations, blogs, demos, and code. After over two decades of professional programming, he is now a self-proclaimed Typed Pure Functional Programming zealot but often compromises on his ideals to just get stuff done. After spending too many sleepless nights in data centers repairing RAID arrays, he now prefers higher-level cloud abstractions with appropriate escape hatches. James is a huge Open Source proponent, hoping to never get burned by lock-in again.

A Tour of the Modern Java Platform
The Java Platform has seen a tremendous amount of evolution and improvements over the past 5 years in many different areas including: language features in Java, Kotlin, and Scala, Functional Programming, dev environments, test workflows, Reactive, Stream processing, distributed data, containerization, Serverless, and AoT compilation. This talk will give you a tour of the most important improvements, why they matter, and how to take advantage of them.