Amsterdam JUG Meetup at Flagsmith

About this event

Join in with the latest Amsterdam JUG Meetup at Flagsmith, Plantage Kerklaan 35, 1018 CV Amsterdam, Netherlands. Would you like to be a speaker at this event? Send a mail with your proposal to [email protected]. Talks will include: • Fun with Flags: How OpenFeature Solves Your Feature Flag Headaches (Simon Schrottner, Flagsmith (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aepfli/)) • No Country For Old Apis - Wrapping Legacy Java Services As MCP Tools Without Rewriting Them (Željko Kozina, Chronomill (https://www.linkedin.com/in/zkozina/)) Details Fun with Flags: How OpenFeature Solves Your Feature Flag Headaches (Simon Schrottner, Flagsmith (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aepfli/)) Feature flags have revolutionized the software delivery lifecycle, enabling teams to decouple releases from deployments and create a more agile development process. They're often hailed as one of the key practices in modern software development—at least in theory. However, as systems grow in complexity, so do the challenges associated with feature flagging. From supporting multiple languages and managing targeted evaluations to avoiding vendor lock-in and safely decommissioning obsolete code, what initially seems like a straightforward problem can quickly become daunting. The OpenFeature community is tackling these challenges head-on by providing vendor-agnostic SDKs and a suite of powerful tools designed to simplify the feature flagging experience. Join me as we explore the common pitfalls of feature flagging and discover how OpenFeature can help bring the fun back into this critical aspect of software development. No Country For Old Apis - Wrapping Legacy Java Services As MCP Tools Without Rewriting Them (Željko Kozina, Chronomill (https://www.linkedin.com/in/zkozina/)) Somewhere in your estate is a Java service old enough to vote. REST endpoints by the dozen, one SOAP relic nobody will admit to, session auth, and the person who understood it all has retired. It works, which is why nobody touches it. And now the business wants AI agents to use it. Every enterprise is under pressure to connect AI agents to systems that were never designed for them, yet most MCP material assumes a greenfield project or a toy demo. This session addresses the situation attendees actually face: a brownfield estate of REST and SOAP services that cannot be rewritten. It is demo-driven, built on the official MCP Java SDK, Spring AI, and Spring for GraphQL, and it is honest about the failure modes: tool sprawl from auto-generation, auth translation, oversized responses, and unsafe retries against non-idempotent writes. Bios Simon builds durable standards and practices so teams can learn, grow, and operate without depending on any single vendor, tool, or person. He is passionate about developer experience, open standards, and building communities where people help each other grow. He regularly speaks at conferences and mentor individuals taking their first steps in the open source world. He is very open to conversations about open source, feature flagging, observability, and what comes next. Željko has spent over 15 years in IT, mostly consulting for banks and insurance companies, with a focus on modernising legacy systems. Along the way, he developed deep expertise in JVM-based technologies and has become a go-to voice on topics such as API design. When he's not untangling someone else's technical debt, he's happily creating his own through a growing collection of personal projects he enthusiastically starts and occasionally finishes. Željko is passionate about sharing knowledge in a way that actually sticks, which usually means keeping things practical, a little entertaining, and free of unnecessary jargon. He is a GraphQL Ambassador and a member of the GraphQL AI Working Group.