IntelliJ IDEA Conf is a virtual conference where the speakers and hosts are gathered in the same location. The 2026 edition was supposed to be in Cyprus in March, but due to the World situation, it was relocated to Amsterdam in September.

My talk was The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java. It was hosted by Anton, who has a long history with enterprise Java from various communities and companies, so we were able to have a good dialogue during the talk, with some anecdotes from the past.

Don’t despair if you missed it. The entire conference is available to watch for free on YouTube, so you can watch my talk as well as all the other talks there anytime you want.

It is an interesting concept for a virtual conference. The studio setup with a host makes it feel more like a conversation than doing a recording in your home office. Hence, it gives a much more dynamic feel to the talk. Since all speakers were gathered there, we had the opportunity to network and chat with each other during the whole two days. The IntelliJ IDEA team from JetBrains also ran a couple of sessions about various topics that we could attend.

Between the sessions, they had a photographer take our speaker portraits. The “fold-your-arms” pose is usually a favorite among portrait photographers, so I have done a few over the years. Here is a side-by-side with the photo taken this week in Amsterdam and one taken ten years ago in Malmö. Ten years later. Same pose. A little more gray hair and a new T-shirt.