Apple IIe and Packard Bell in the late 80s/early 90s, playing games like Three Stooges and Wolfenstein 3D, taking a year off after high school to work at FedEx as a package handler which motivated him to pursue higher education, his first professional job working on insurance regulation software using Java 1.4 with Apache Struts and custom frameworks, transitioning to Spring 2.5 and experiencing the XML configuration challenges, experience with the microservices hype around 2015 and learning that organizations that couldn't build good monoliths wouldn't succeed with microservices either, automated testing and JUnit 5, meeting Pratik Patel at DevNexus which led to his first devrel position at IBM, traveling extensively for conferences including J-Fall in the Netherlands, being laid off from IBM in 2021 and joining Oracle's Java team, focusing on JDK technologies like JFR, garbage collection, and project leyden, helping organize the Kansas City Developers Conference, involvement in reviving JavaOne as a standalone conference, the importance of automated testing with tools like Test Containers versus older approaches with H2 databases, the challenges of maintaining code coverage as a metric, the evolution of Java, focus on Java observability tools and performance optimization

Billy Korando on twitter: @BillyKorando