Software Engineering Events in Leuven

Spooky season is upon us! And what better place to celebrate it than with a BeJUG event. In true groundhog day vibes, were going to Leuven!

A big thank you to Cegeka for hosting us once again.

Two excellent speakers ready to share some knowledge:

• Tom Cools (short talk) will talk about "Adopt a Black Cat: Rehabilitating unloved technologies", making the case for the tools and approaches everyone's written off as "old school" or "nobody does that anymore," and why fit sometimes beats fashion.
• Eddie Cho will tell us more about data batch processing.
• Peter De Coninck will show us "Breaking changes, there's a test for that!", an opinionated look at how automated testing with SpringBoot, RestAssured and Wiremock can catch the breakage your green pipeline missed.

Come join us for this next event!

Schedule
18:00: Doors open + Food and Drinks
18:45: Intro and BeJUG updates
18:50: Talk 1
19:15: Talk 2
19:35: Little break
19:45: Talk 3
20:30: Mingling + Drinks

Topics

Breaking changes, there's a test for that!

Every developer has it happen. Your feature is done and deployed, and some seemingly unrelated feature has broken. But you wrote unit tests, and the pipeline is green!
This talk is an opinionated view on how automated tests help you avoid this. We take a look at how we can achieve it in SpringBoot with RestAssured and Wiremock.

About Peter
Peter has been working in IT since 2011, and a java developer since 2015. He's seen federal government, fintech, and some other places. He spends his free time trying to maintain or develop too many projects with too few tokens. He loves to talk and share his insights.

Adopt a Black Cat: Rehabilitating Unloved Technologies
Every tech community has its black cats: those tools and approaches that get passed over and ignored. These technologies aren't broken... they just gained a bad reputation, leading to statements like:

"That's old school."
"That doesn't scale."
"Nobody does that anymore."

In this talk, we'll look at a handful of technologies that have been unfairly written off and make the case why they deserve a second look. Because the right tool for the job is sometimes the one everyone told you to stop using.

You'll leave with a clearer framework for evaluating fit over fashion, learn a couple new libraries and frameworks and maybe even discover a new appreciation for the cats nobody wants to adopt.

About Tom
Developer Relations Engineer for Timefold, Java Champion and leader of the Belgian Java User Group. Tom has a decade worth of experience delivering systems and loves to share not only knowledge but also passion for our craft. Has black cats.

Data Batch Processing With Open-Source Solutions: Apache NiFi vs Spring Batch.

Data batch processing is a cornerstone of modern enterprise architecture. In this talk, we will explore two open-source solutions designed can handle batch workloads at scale: Spring Batch and Apache NiFi.

We will break down their core architectural design concepts—including built-in patterns like fault tolerance, back pressure handling, and methods for scaling—while evaluating the ideal operational scenarios for each tool. Additionally, I will give attendees a clear understanding of the out-of-box solutions provided by both projects and help them determine when to leverage native features versus building custom implementations.

About Eddie
Eddie is an experienced Java Engineer with a strong passion for open-source and software communities. He enjoys diving into the implementation details and internals of open-source projects. His goal is to help Java engineers better understand the technologies they use and make better architectural decisions when building software with them.

Additional notes:

• This meetup includes food. Please keep your RSVP status up to date so we do not waste any of our food.
• Some pictures might be made. If you feel uncomfortable about this, please mention this to the organizers (or anyone with a camera).

Unlock'd hosts the Flutter Belgium Meetup #29. Are you a Flutter expert or just curious about what Flutter is? Everybody is welcome and the goal is to share and learn together about everything in the Dart & Flutter space.

There will be food, drinks, Lightning Talks, technical sessions, and a lot of room for networking. Hope to see you there!!!

Program:
18:00: Doors are open
18:15: Food for all
18:30: Lightning Talks
19:00: Session 1 - TBD
19:40: Session 2 - TBD
20:20: Open Space
21:00: Networking

Lightning talks:
Lightning talks are ~5 minutes talks. These are 'stand-up' talks so you can just go for it 'on the spot' if you have a cool demo, some new package or widget to talk about or just something you find interesting or funny to share with the group! Don't worry if you never gave a lightning talk before. It's a perfect opportunity to practise talks in a friendly environment.

Open space:
The open space is a ~30-40min workshop like session. The meetup participants are asked to suggest topics for the discussion. A topic can also follow from a Lightning Talk in which a topic is suggested or a question is shared. There can be multiple sessions in parallel and depending on interest everyone can choose which session they want to participate in.

Join the Flutter Belgium Slack:
https://join.slack.com/t/flutter-belgium/shared_invite/zt-81t45m0z-v8GpUna8LT9mILTK9oKbOA

Come and join your fellow peers to have a good time practicing writing code to get better at writing code in your real jobs.

We’ll start off with koffiekoeken and form pairs to do the Game of Life Code Kata.
After 45 minutes we’ll delete all our code and talk about new insights you’ve gained.
Then we’ll pair up with new people and do it all over again but with new constraints applied, like not using conditional expressions, or committing code on green within 2 minutes.

At some point we’ll break for lunch and we’ll figure something out for dinner too.

What to bring?

This event is very hands-on and it’s always better to come prepared.
Bring your laptop (and peripherals if this helps you code better).
Make sure you’ve installed GIT, and some programming languages you like.
Here are some kickstarting code repositories you can already clone to see if they are usable for you on your machine:
https://github.com/SoftwareSandbox/coderetreat-kotlin
https://github.com/SoftwareSandbox/coderetreat-java17
https://github.com/SoftwareSandbox/coderetreat-elm
https://github.com/TimmyGilissen/coderetreat-dotnetcore

Schedule

08:30 Welcome with koffiekoeken
09:00 Kick-off, facilitated by Tim Schraepen
09:30 First kata
12:30 Lunch break
13:30 More kata’s
17:30 Closing

Is this event for me?

If one or more of these apply to you, I’d say you’ll have a good time and learn something new:

• You’re a student and want to learn from people that code for a living
• You want to improve your coding skills
• You want to learn how to improve your AI context/harness engineering via software crafting skills
• You’ve never done Test Driven Development before
• You’re experienced and want to pair with somebody outside of your team
• You’re very experienced and want to help your peers grow their coding skills

Practical Info

Our host of the day is AE | Adapt & Enable and along with sponsoring the food and drinks, they’ve lent their office space (desks, monitors, meeting rooms, …) to help you become a better software developer.