In this episode of the Oracle Groundbreakers Podcast, I spoke with Dmitry Alexandrov as he was preparing for his session at Jfokus 2021, Sweden’s largest Java conference. A well-known speaker at Java conferences throughout the world, Alexandrov ran a live coding session on Project Helidon at this year’s Jfokus, held online in February. Project Helidon is a collection of Java libraries for writing microservices. Dmitry covered the performance improvements and new features in Helidon 2.1. See his session abstract here.

Helidon is not just a Java engineering project for coding microservices; it's an open source project as well. So developers from around the world can contribute via the community on GitHub. This is the real power of the technology—the people sharing their talent and experience to contribute to the project. When Dmitry talks about Helidon, you can tell by the tone of his voice how much he appreciates the people he meets in development communities.

If you want to learn how to start a Java user group—and have that group grow into a major Java conference—Dmitry and his "gang of six" have done it. He's happy to share the experience. Just listen.