You worked hard, learned a lot of technologies, and built your experience with challenging projects. You reached an enviable position in your company and team. Congrats, you are an accomplished Senior Java Dev! Now what? What are the next steps? Many companies often pressure developers to take on management roles. It could be a path, if this is what you want. But there are alternatives! This talk will discuss the 5 paths for developers to grow beyond senior levels. Specially for devs like you that want to keep focusing on the tech side. What are your opportunities, and what are the challenges you will face? Come see how it is possible to focus on the technical side! Learn to build a fulfilling career and grow to the highest levels in your career. All while you keep loving your work!

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore enables us to deploy and operate highly capable AI agents securely, at scale. It offers infrastructure purpose-built for dynamic agent workloads, powerful tools to enhance agents, and essential controls for real-world deployment. In this talk, we'll dive deep into various aspects of how to implement an AI Agent in Java using Spring AI, including using the MCP Streamable HTTP Client to talk to the MCP Server with exposed tools. Then, we'll look at the Embabel framework for authoring agentic flows on the JVM that supports intelligent path finding towards goals and cover its benefits. We'll host our agent on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime and look at other AgentCore features like Observability (in standardized OpenTelemetry compatible format), Gateway (to securely connect to MCP-compatible tools), short and long-term Memory, and Identity. Finally, we'll look at the spring-ai-agentcore project, which provides various integrations between Spring AI and Bedrock AgentCore.

Since single page applications have become the de facto standard for building modern web applications, the complexity of frameworks and tools has continued to grow. But does it always have to be an SPA? For many applications, this associated complexity is not necessary. The necessary interactivity of many business applications is minimal. What if HTML were more powerful and, for example, every element could trigger an AJAX request and a response would not always replace the entire page? This presentation looks at central elements of hypermedia applications and how HTMX can implement typical patterns of modern web applications. In combination with modern template engines (Thymeleaf, JTE, JStachio), ‘full-stack development’ is once again possible and even fun!