On the way home from ShiftAPPens in Coimbra, Portugal, I stopped by York, England to give a guest lecture at the University of York. This is the first time I did a guest lecture like this and I hope it wasn’t the last. It is great to get the opportunity to get the feel for what is going on in academia and maybe provide some insights of what is going on in the industry. This feedback loop is often something that is neglected. In this age of AI and abundance of information and misinformation, I think it is more important than ever. Java is used everywhere. And the industry needs the learning institutions to teach Java. We need more initiatives like Java in Education by the Java Community Process (JCP).

With Jakarta EE, we (i.e. Shabnam, Tanja, and myself) are doing multiple activities to involve students, such as hackathons and lectures like this one. We are also revamping the web pages to make it easer to find resources to learn about Jakarta EE. The new Developer Portal is one such thing.

For my guest lecture, I chose to do the Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java presentation. It was well received, even if the students were not even born when Java was created and the first adventures with J2EE started. I limited my inside jokes about the early days of EJBs to accommodate for that. The rest of the presentation were well received and I had great questions and insights after the lecture.

On my way back from my adventure at the University of York, I had dinner in Manchester since I was flying out from Manchester Airport the following day. After I had enjoyed some great contemporary Indian food, I headed back to the hotel. On the train, I decided to browse the map of Manchester, and I came across the Alan Turin Memorial and I discovered that I had passed right by it on my way to the restaurant. A little too late, but it also gives me a reason to go back so I can check out the statue of the “Father of Computer Science”.