GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech

This interview was recorded for GOTO State of the Art in March 2026.
https://gotopia.tech

Ben Evans - Senior Principal SW Engineer at Red Hat & Co-Author of "Optimizing Cloud Native Java" & many more Books

Read the full transcription of this interview here:
https://gotopia.tech/articles/439

RESOURCES
Ben
https://mastodon.social/@kittylyst
https://bsky.app/profile/ogkittylyst.bsky.social
https://github.com/kittylyst
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kittylyst
https://www.kittylyst.com

Links
https://newrelic.com/resources/report/2024-state-of-the-java-ecosystem
https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-25
https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/hackerbot-claw-github-actions-exploitation
https://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-coding-agents
https://openjdk.org/jeps/8305968
https://openjdk.org/jeps/353
https://openjdk.org/jeps/416
https://developer.ibm.com/articles/j-ffm
https://openjdk.org/jeps/8350458
https://openjdk.org/jeps/8303099

DESCRIPTION
In this GOTO State of the Art, Java Champion & Red Hat Senior Principal SW Engineer Ben Evans delivers a sweeping, data-driven audit of Java's health in 2026 — and the picture is far healthier than the tech press would have you believe. Server-side Java workloads have roughly doubled in the last 7 years, developer wages are stable (unlike JavaScript, which is heading south), Java has been in the top 4 programming languages for 12 consecutive years, and the entire cloud-native infrastructure stack — Kafka, Cassandra, Spark, OpenTelemetry, Keycloak — runs on it. The real insight is mathematical: explosive growth of a small language base is still dwarfed by modest growth of Java's enormous installed base. Java isn't dying; it's just not shiny enough to get clicks.

The meat of the talk is a masterclass in Java's architecture and roadmap. Ben unpacks the fundamental tension between dynamism (the JVM's Lisp-and-Smalltalk-heritage runtime) and integrity (modern security demands that restrict unchecked internal API access), before walking through the near and far future: Project Valhalla's value types (the most fundamental change to Java ever — bigger than generics or lambdas), the Vector API waiting on Valhalla to land, nullability markers, ahead-of-time compilation, and beyond that, type classes and Project Babylon.

His honest take on AI tooling is sharp: great for greenfield, genuinely poor at architectural reasoning and version-specific code, and only a real productivity multiplier for teams who already have solid engineering practices. Oh, and it's a wolf in sheep's clothing — the JVM's dynamism makes it way closer to Lisp than to C++, and Java's philosophy of "boring done right" turns out to be an excellent foundation for AI-era enterprise software.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Ben Evans & Jim Gough • Optimizing Cloud Native Java • https://amzn.to/41nivD9
Ben Evans, Jason Clark & David Flanagan • Java in a Nutshell • https://amzn.to/43FDoMA
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This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club.
http://gotopia.tech/bookclub

Ekaterina Gorshkova - Apache Kafka Engineer at SOFTEC & Author of "Kafka for Architects"
Viktor Gamov - Principal Developer Advocate at Confluent & Co-Author of "Kafka in Action"

Check out more here:
https://gotopia.tech/episodes/440

RESOURCES
Ekaterina
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ekaterina-gorshkova-978bb6
https://medium.com/@katyagorshkova

Viktor
https://bsky.app/profile/gamussa.dev
https://x.com/gAmUssA
https://github.com/gamussa
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vikgamov
https://gamov.io

Links
45% off discount code (expires on 25 May 2026): GOTOKGKafka
Affiliate link: https://hubs.la/Q044HgTv
https://current.confluent.io/london

DESCRIPTION
Apache Kafka has evolved far beyond a simple message broker — it has become a foundational layer for modern enterprise software. In this GOTO Book Club episode, Ekaterina Gorshkova, author of "Kafka for Architects", shares how her decade-long journey with Kafka — starting in a Czech bank's integration team in 2015 — shaped her understanding of what it really takes to design Kafka-based systems at scale. The conversation covers core architectural decisions, real-world patterns for enterprise integration, the role of Kafka Streams, and how to avoid the classic pitfalls of building systems that "only three engineers understand".

The episode also looks forward: Ekaterina and host Viktor Gamov explore how Kafka is increasingly becoming the connective tissue for AI-driven systems, acting as an orchestration layer between intelligent agents, real-time data, and business workflows. Her book's central argument is that while AI and tooling change fast, the fundamental knowledge of how to design robust, event-driven systems is durable and career-proof. Kafka for Architects is framed not just as a technical manual, but as a roadmap for architects who want to get Kafka right from day one — requirements, design, testing, and all.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Ekaterina Gorshkova • Kafka for Architects • https://amzn.to/42mDarU
Dylan Scott, Viktor Gamov & Dave Klein • Kafka in Action • https://amzn.to/4vJ3Kcj
Viktor Gamov, Tartakovsky, Rasputnis & Fain • Enterprise Web Development • https://amzn.to/3CezL0R
Shapira, Palino, Sivaram & Petty • Kafka: The Definitive Guide • https://amzn.to/3RPtdLP
Bill Bejeck • Kafka Streams in Action • https://amzn.to/3CGJiiM
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This conversation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2025.
https://gotocph.com

Sam Aaron - Live Coding Musician & Creator of Sonic Pi
James Lewis - Principal Consultant & Technical Director at Thoughtworks

RESOURCES
Sam
https://www.patreon.com/samaaron
https://bsky.app/profile/samaaron.bsky.social
https://twitter.com/samaaron
https://github.com/samaaron
https://linkedin.com/in/samaaron

James
https://bsky.app/profile/boicy.bovon.org
https://twitter.com/boicy
https://linkedin.com/in/james-lewis-microservices

Links
https://sonic-pi.net
https://twitter.com/sonic_pi
https://github.com/sonic-pi-net/sonic-pi
https://www.ableton.com/en/link
https://hydra.ojack.xyz

DESCRIPTION
Programming isn't just lines of code, it's a gateway to creating music & art. Legends such as Ada Lovelace are proof of that. With the aim to reshape the perception of coding which has traditionally been complex and intimidating, Sam Aaron created Sonic Pi, an open-source, free-to-use platform that empowers users to create music through code.

What began as a humble endeavor has grown exponentially with more than millions of downloads globally and a large number of schools integrating the tool as part of their computing curriculum to teach children how to program.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Sam Aaron & Russell Barnes • Code Music with Sonic Pi • https://amzn.to/4hBRYtC
Hans Gruendel • Making Music with Sonic Pi • https://amzn.to/3oVxGV7
Hans Gruendel • Learn to Program with Sonic PI • https://amzn.to/3qCrLEO
Simon Monk • Raspberry Pi Cookbook • https://amzn.to/43AGPRX
Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais • Team Topologies • http://amzn.to/3sVLyLQ
Forsgren, Humble & Kim • Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps • https://amzn.to/3tCz1xO
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This interview was recorded for GOTO Unscripted.
https://gotopia.tech

Will McGugan - Creator of Toad & the Python Packages, Rich, Textual & PyFilesystem
Olimpiu Pop - Technologist & Tech Journalist

ORIGINAL TALK TITLE
The Python Dev Who Built Rich, Textual & now Toad Just Redesigned How You Talk to AI

Check out more here:
https://gotopia.tech/articles/437

RESOURCES
Will
https://mastodon.social/@willmcgugan
https://x.com/willmcgugan
https://bsky.app/profile/willmcgugan.bsky.social
https://github.com/willmcgugan
https://www.linkedin.com/in/willmcgugan
https://willmcgugan.github.io

Olimpiu
https://x.com/olimpiupop
https://github.com/zroll
https://www.linkedin.com/in/olimpiupop

Links
https://www.textualize.io
https://www.batrachian.ai
https://github.com/textualize/rich
https://github.com/Textualize/textual
https://zed.dev
https://willmcgugan.github.io/toad-released
https://willmcgugan.github.io/announcing-toad

DESCRIPTION
In this GOTO Unscripted episode, Olimpiu Pop sits down with Will McGugan — Python PSF Fellow and creator of Rich (4+ billion downloads) and Textual — to demo his sabbatical project: Toad, a slick terminal-based universal frontend for AI coding agents.
Will's frustration was simple and justified: every major AI coding tool (Claude Code, Gemini, Codex) was built on top-tier models but wrapped in a UI that looked like it was designed in 2004. Toad fixes that by using the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) as a standardized plug-in layer, giving users elegant prompt editing, proper streaming markdown rendering, beautiful tables, syntax highlighting, and a hybrid shell-plus-AI interface — all in the terminal, where developers already live.

The conversation gets sharply honest when the topic turns to AI and developer craft. Will — a 30-year coding veteran who admits it's not instinctive for him to reach for AI — shares a clear-eyed view of its strengths and limits: AI is extraordinarily fast at anything well-defined and unambiguous, but still struggles with genuinely novel problems.

His conclusion?
Most of what software developers do day-to-day isn't actually novel — it's pattern assembly — and that's precisely where AI shines. The future of coding isn't replacement; it's liberation from the mechanical grind. Oh, and the podcast host literally reading out "music intro here" because stage directions ended up in the transcript? That one's a cautionary tale for the ages.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Will McGugan • Beginning Python Games Development 2nd ed. • https://amzn.to/4ebBfxu
Will McGugan • Beginning Game Development with Python and Pygame • https://amzn.to/4cyVdB3
Sam Keen • Clean Architecture with Python • https://amzn.to/4pBT5g0
Eric Evans • Domain-Driven Design • https://amzn.to/3tnGhwm
Naomi Ceder • The Quick Python Book • https://amzn.to/3zwdDOa
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This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club.
http://gotopia.tech/bookclub

Ian F. Darwin - Java, Android & Unix Developer, Trainer, Mentor & Author of "Java Cookbook"
Jeanne Boyarsky - Oracle Java Champion, Co-Author of "Real-World Java" & "OCP 21 Java Cert Book"

Check out more here:
https://gotopia.tech/episodes/438

RESOURCES
Ian
https://fosstodon.org/@IanDarwin
https://x.com/Ian_Darwin
https://github.com/IanDarwin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/idarwin
https://www.darwinsys.com

Jeanne
https://bsky.app/profile/jeanneboyarsky.bsky.social
https://mastodon.social/@jeanneboyarsky
https://x.com/jeanneboyarsky
https://github.com/boyarsky
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanne-boyarsky
https://sites.google.com/view/jeanneboyarsky
https://www.selikoff.net

Links
https://javacookbook.org
https://dev.java/community/jcs

DESCRIPTION
In this GOTO Book Club, Java Champion Jeanne Boyarsky interviews Ian F. Darwin — author of one of Java's most enduring reference books, Java Cookbook, now in its fifth edition covering up to Java 25. The conversation traces Ian's extraordinary journey: from writing Java's first commercial training course outside of Sun Microsystems, to meeting Tim O'Reilly at a Unix conference and handing him a chapter on lint, to delivering a class in Houston where the entire room had just been laid off and were using the course as their golden handshake into a new career. Ian talks about the philosophy behind the book — culling a peak 900-page beast down to a tight 600 pages, anchoring tool choices on proven, battle-tested picks like JUnit, Mockito, and logging — and shares his three favourite chapters: Regular Expressions, Object-Oriented Techniques, and Reflection.

The conversation gets sharply honest about AI and the future of the industry. Ian — who uses Claude as his coding assistant and does vibe code — warns that his greatest fear isn't AI taking over the world, but something subtler and more dangerous: companies stopping junior hires because AI can do the work, leaving no one to grow into the deep expertise that retires with the current generation. The parallel risk for books is equally candid: AI was trained on older editions, so the fifth edition is genuinely new and un-scraped territory.

His advice for anyone who has learned the basics of Java?
Don't ask an AI — buy the cookbook, save yourself years of trial and error, and for goodness' sake, read the code before you deploy it. "It's like building an airplane and putting passengers on it without flight testing."

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Ian F. Darwin • Java Cookbook 5th ed. • https://amzn.to/3QH0NZy
Ian F. Darwin • Java Cookbook 1st ed. • https://amzn.to/4sUpPlL
Ian F. Darwin • Checking C Programs with Lint • https://amzn.to/3Q2C69Y
Victor Grazi & Jeanne Boyarsky • Real-World Java • https://amzn.to/4oCEeBR
Jeanne Boyarsky & Scott Selikoff • OCP 21 Java Cert Book • https://amzn.to/4lF8OIC
Bluesky
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