An Evening of 2 Talks: with Jennifer Reif (Neo4j) and Dmitry Chuyko (BellSoft)

CJUG and the Chicago Kotlin Users Group (CKUG) will be co-hosting 2 special guest speakers at our November meetup:

• Jennifer Reif from Neo4j (our Gold Sponsor)
• Dmitry Chuyko from BellSoft

Talk #1 (50-60 minutes with Q&A)
Speaker: Jennifer Reif, Developer Advocate at Neo4j
Title: Pass or Play: What does GenAI mean for the Java Developer?
Description:
You've been tasked with implementing or learning AI, whether that includes LLMs, RAG, or MLOps. The sea of acronyms in this era of AI can feel like (and sometimes actually are) a black box for the complex logic and processes that underpin them. There's so much to learn and not enough time.

In this session, we'll explore how these technologies operate and the different practical ways GenAI is being used. We will explain common architectures for applications with GenAI, including RAG and GraphRAG. Live-code examples will show how Java developers can start using GenAI and help determine where they can be best applied. Come see how to play in the GenAI era.

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Talk #2 (30 minutes including Q&A)
Speaker: Dmitry Chuyko, Senior Performance Architect at BellSoft
Title: Debug Your Native Java
Description:
GraalVM Native Image can be used to turn your service into a standalone platform executable. Such executables provide valuable performance benefits in production, and the process of creating them is now supported as a standard procedure by major application frameworks. Nevertheless, there are several quirks. Some of them appear at build time (like the build time itself). Some appear at run time. Take debugging, for example. Regular JVM debuggers work using the JDWP protocol. However, native programs require native platform debuggers, and certain support should be added to Native Image. BellSoft recently implemented such debugging support for macOS, so we'll analyze how it works with different operating systems and tools.

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Agenda (US Central Time / Chicago):
5:30 pm Doors open - Pizzas / Social networking
5:50 pm CJUG Intro & Announcements
6:00 pm Presentation #1 w/ Q&A (Jennifer Reif)
7:05 pm Presentation #2 w/ Q&A (Dmitry Chuyko)
7:35 pm Raffles (2 JetBrains licenses)
7:40 pm After-event social time
8:00 pm Lights out

*** For participants who are not located in Chicago, we'll provide you the live-streaming link in the event comment section before the start of the meetup.