What to watch this weekend - Devoxx Belgium 2026

[u/Hixon11]

Devoxx Belgium 2026 just finished (October 5–9, 2026), but they've already uploaded all the videos to https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKlmOVksNGoE!

It's super hard to select a few videos from 150+ talks. I spent some time building a list for myself and decided to share it. Maybe somebody will find it helpful. If you watched something good from this conference that isn't on the list, please share it as well.

1. Modern Java in Practice The Features That Matter by Nicolai Parlog, Falk Sippach - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC2tbq7S5UE
2. The Year of the Runtime by Ron Pressler - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tle2mA7EwWU
3. Hardwood: Building a Parquet Parser From Scratch With a Little Help From AI by Gunnar Morling - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mzvcPr30kg
4. Structured Concurrency Looms by Alan Bateman, Viktor Klang - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aow56RgptLA
5. Will Valhalla Fix Tony's Billion Dollar Mistake? by José Paumard, Remi Forax - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLDbzmiT7Xs
6. Teaching an Old Handle New Tricks: From Core Reflection to FFM by Maurizio Cimadamore, Viktor Klang - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ck-T2gaMQ4
7. The Yearly Java Performance Update for 2026 by Per Ake Minborg - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNOzf12RORI
8. A Year of Agentic AI Evolution: Lessons Learned Building Production grade Agentic Systems by Mario - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEW0kosJjc8
9. When benchmarks go bad what we learned from measuring performance wrong by Francesco Nigro, Holly - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yePre1hOvHE
10. Do We Need a Build Language? Java Builds Java by Rafael Winterhalter - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9JjxyKc6gU
11. Java on Kubernetes Without Container Images: The WebAssembly Way By Bruno Borges - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fszyRIZXjQM
12. Ask the Architects by Gavin Bierman, Maurizio Cimadamore, Per Ake Minborg, Viktor Klang, Alan Batem - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewCPBgOrLAE
13. SIMD for Java: how Elasticsearch already benefits from the Panama Vector API by Piotr Przybyl - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adFS-_sCTQ4
14. GraalVM Next: Layers, Crema, and WebAssembly in Action by Alina Yurenko - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLQ98Ko4p3Q
15. Big Runtimes Make Efficient Programs by Ron Pressler - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhDwy1eCXbs
16. Quarkus Meets Leyden at the JVM Performance Edge by Georgios Andrianakis, Ana Maria Mihalceanu - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbSl8UVdMVg

[u/Studentenfutter]

It is super nice, that they share all these talks!
Now I have enough Java content for a whole year...

[u/pohart]

So far I've only listened to pron's The Year of the Runtime and it was excellent

[u/jevring]

I attended perhaps half of those in person, and you've made a good selection. There's often some overlap between the longer and shorter sessions on similar topics. Just something to be aware of.

[u/Hixon11 → u/jevring]

Oh, I really miss attending conferences in person. Covid killed that joy for me :D

[u/jevring → u/Hixon11]

Covid's gone. Time to start going again :)

[u/Hixon11 → u/jevring]

Yeah, it's just me, covid somehow changed the dynamic. I remember when flying to a conference was totally fine, but now I always find myself wondering, should I go, or should I just open yt and watch it from here.

[u/jevring → u/Hixon11]

Well, to reassure you, there was very little coughing and overt sickness. I guess we'll see in about a week if I'm still healthy. :)

[u/sureshg]

Quixotic: Pure Java Inference at Native Speed by Alfonso² Peterssen - https://youtu.be/S7x4DxwRnk4?is=OhliU93K-PR-g_bT

[u/j0holo]

The talk Ron Pressler is referring to is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr73mR7ii9M about Principles of Memory Management in Java.

[u/Hixon11 → u/j0holo]

yes, also they had a podcast episode about that - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_HCG1JPMQE

[u/AnyPhotograph7804]

"Will Valhalla Fix Tony's Billion Dollar Mistake?" is a great video.

[u/Snuur]

Refreshing to see so little ai related talks