The Power of Open Source: Java, Quarkus, and Building a Developer Career with Dimitris Andreadis – Techstrong Unplugged EP56

Welcome back to Textron Unplugged. My name is Cassandra Chen, and today we have Demitrius. Andrea ADIs.

Can you introduce yourself? Uh, thanks for having, having me. Uh, yes, I'm, uh, Demitri and um, I work for, uh, red Hat.

I'm a engineering director and I've been here like 20 years. I've spent the first, uh, 15 years on a open source project called, uh, JBoss Application Server. And the last five years I'm mostly involved with, uh, the project called Corcus.

I have my t-shirts here. Um, so both in the Java space and both in the, let's say, infrastructure or tooling for other developers to take it and build stuff. How did you get into technology?

Um, I, I, I think for me it started, uh, with a movie. Uh, I saw, uh, when I was a teenager and um, the movie was called, uh, war Games and it was about a teenager that used his laptop, no laptop, his computer. They were not laptops back then to hack into the Pentagon computer.

And there was an AI system there, and the teenager Israel thinking he was playing a game, he was about to start a nuclear war. And the movie goes on and, and for me it was like interesting as a kid to see how much you could do with computers, like from your bedroom essentially. Uh, and then I started with, uh, home computers, like of the time and I studied it and it became my profession.

So I think that was like the, the tipping point. And today you work with cus Mostly cus Yeah, I have a quite a large team. Uh, the CUS team is, uh, you know, part of course it's an open source project, so we have like 50 people in Red HU that do coo, but uh, last week we celebrated, uh, 1000 contributors.

So there are about 950 people outside our team that like our project and then contribute to it in their, either in their free time or as part of their job. Um, how do you work to get like new people and younger developers to work on the project? Let's say if, if you are already somehow, like you're studying or you're already at some level where you are able to code in Java, something non-trivial.

Uh, on our website you can go and you can click and you can go on GitHub and we have, uh, issues marked, uh, with a label called, uh, uh, good First, uh, task. So those are small tasks that are not too difficult that someone could just pick up and start doing something and we can help. Of course, we, we have a lot of people on our public channels like, uh, Zule or a mailing list, and you can go and ask for help.

You know, I want to do this, you know, is it okay, here's my pull request, we will review it. Yeah. That if you're already somehow in, in the Java space, How was your personal experience like when you first got into open source?

I think what was fascinating was, uh, back in my time there was not much open source. It was like the beginnings and the code was secrets. So if, if you want to know like how Microsoft Windows were or Unix, you didn't have a lot of ways to do that.

You know, you, you have to go and work for a company in the States probably that's doing this sort of stuff, but when open source came, suddenly the code was there and you could read the code and, and figure out how it works and learn and do your own extensions. Um, and by doing so, you, you can discover code that is like really, really high quality. So the, when I saw like some stuff in Jbo, I was impressed.

It was this that was really, really advanced. I, you know, I you do not expect, you thought it's open source, so it's, it's crap, you know, like, uh, but it's, that's not true because when you write open source, your code is visible. So other people will look at this and they will propose changes.

Yeah, you could do this better here or this is not good, you know, change it. Which initially it might be a bit intimidating because, oh, you know, my God is not good, but the only way to learn is to, you know, uh, work with others but are better, are you? And they will help you improve.

I think it's good to get feedback on your Work. Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Um, some, sometimes feedback can be brutal. Like, uh, oh, that's a stupid idea, you know, but, uh, you shouldn't feel, uh, offended because someone is, uh, discussing this piece of code doesn't discuss you as a person. So this piece of code is fixing not you.

Right. Some people take it personally and they retract, oh, you know, that's too harsh. But that's not the case really.

You have, Yeah, it can be hard sometimes. Yeah. Are you give me a talk here.

I'm, I'm done, I'm done. Now I'm gonna talk. So I had two talks.

One talk was about, uh, developers and how they can, uh, get better. And, and the ideal thing is for me, if, if you have found out your passion in technology or pretty much anything you do, how you get there. Um, and my advice is based on observing some very successful people in my team and how they did this.

So my talk tries to convey practical advice on how they did it and how this could work for you. What is some of this advice? Um, so very short is like, know what you like and go into it.

Like that's the, the superstore version. But things that could help would be to, um, be creative and experiment with things in order to find what might interest, um, get closer to communities that do this sort of stuff. Um, and there's, there's a lot.

There are many communities now. Um, so go there, try something, get to know the people, introduce yourself, um, and just do more of it. You have to do more and more and more.

So you need to find every possible excuse that will let you do the thing you like, either in a company setting or, uh, on a educational setting. Like get the projects on the thing you like so that you spend time on it, um, and do more and more of it. Uh, and at some point, you know, you might be lucky and you know, someone gives you an offer, oh yeah, come and do this for me.

Like, for for work or something. How does this relate to you personally? Are you doing something you like right now?

Yes. Um, this, uh, QO project that we started like from scratch, um, it really redefines, uh, the things you could do with Java because if you remember, Java was great to write, right? Servers and big systems, but then the cloud came and people started switching to other, other languages that were like smaller nimbler.

So what we did with this project was to make Java sexy again for the cloud, and very attractive also for developers, uh, to, we, we call it a developer joy. So you just, uh, fire up your id, you, you start qo and then QO will do the right thing for you. You just keep coding, coding and, you know, make it fun.

So Corus connects Java and the cloud? Yes, pretty much. Yeah, exactly.

Uh, how long have you been working on Corcus? Uh, five years now. Yeah.

And before that there was another open source project like, uh, the JBoss application server that really redefined this, uh, space. Um, it was the first, let's say open source server that really broke through. And, uh, we competed with the likes of Oracle, IBM, uh, well, web, web, well, sphere Logic.

Um, and we were acquired by Red Hat. So that was a big, um, like it was a big thing at the time. And big part of our team is related or has transitioned into this, uh, newer project.

So I know those people, like for a long time, you know, we had fun together and we, we keep having fun doing, uh, what we like basically. Do you have a strong passion for Java since you're working on Corus? Yeah, I think Java is still like a very interesting language to start.

I know young developers will do like a Python and Java script, uh, which is fine for some type of projects. I think Python is great to like experiment and do something quickly, but if you have to build a system that is mission critical or you know, it has to do with money or you know, air, you know, or some other critical aspects, I, I don't think you can do the Python. I think Java is still, and by keep evolving Java, we make it very relevant, not just recently we are adding capability to let you do AI stuff.

So I think we, Python is king that in this domain, but I think we're cutting up. So Java developers can do like AI stuff now easily with Java. Do you have any words to get young developers excited about joining open source projects?

Yeah, well, um, they can build up a career either around Opens source or just technology. So if you go to give an interview now, quite often you just send the link to your GitHub. So we're going to your GitHub and check what have you done.

Like, so it's, it's a very strong, um, element to say, oh, I've contributed to this project. It's a complex project. So that automatically means you know, how to navigate the complete project, you know, how to work with people, you know, to use the latest tooling.

Uh, it's like your, your CV basically now, and, and for me, normally that's enough. I, in many cases, you, I, let's say someone finish like a degree, great, it's an achievement, but that doesn't show like if you know how to do the work. So your GitHub is more appropriate in this regard.

So, so Your GI on page really shows what you've done. Yeah. Like, like that's your resume, your pro, the pro.

I want to know the project you've, you've done. I want to know what the made you excited about those projects, who you work with, what was your role, um, what you wanna do next, what your plans are. So with that, so I can kind of sense if you're the type right type of person to join, uh, my team, I think it's useful to know that your GitHub page is like a resume.

Yeah, We've had a really good chat today. Thank you. Thank you too.

That was great.