DevBcn 2026

I had the pleasure of spending 2 days at the DevBcn conference this week. Living in Barcelona, it was great not to have to travel for once!

The location was the World Trade Center in the harbour, a change of venue from previous years - and in my opinion a major upgrade. 4 separate concurrent tracks provided plenty of variety and coverage across Java, AI, frontend and other developer technologies.

My talk was entitled "The De-evolution of Java" - which considers an extended example that illustrates just how much things have changed, using a novel way of approaching the ideas of "growing a language": By starting from a Java 25 program and "running it backwards" through the versions, losing language features as we go and noting the fixes that need to happen to make it continue to run we will build up a picture of just how much Java has evolved in recent years.

Images were provided by my wife Anna Evans and included: and

My slides from the talk are here and the code for the sample application is here - pull requests (to the appropriate branch) most welcome.

It was wonderful to see so many friends and colleagues, and I'd like to thank the organisers for inviting me to give a talk. Here's hoping for 2027!