LJC Meet-up at Discover

Tue Nov 11 2025 at 06:00 pm to 09:00 pm UTC+00:00

Discover | London

Barry and Dominique of RecWorks, on behalf of the London Java Community
Publisher/HostBarry and Dominique of RecWorks, on behalf of the London Java Community
LJC Meet-up at Discover
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LJC Meet-ups is a new series of events, aimed at giving all Community members an opportunity to present at an LJC event.
About this Event

Join us on November 11th London for this special London Java Community meetup in partnership with Discover that reimagines developer productivity, inspires developer to harness AI tools for smarter workflows and confront the hidden risks of AI in code.



Talk 1 - Holly Cummins, Senior Principal Software Engineer at IBM.

How Quarkus makes your apps cheaper, greener, and happier

Quarkus makes both people and hardware more efficient. That’s cool, but how does it work? Usually, we expect to trade-off developer experience against runtime efficiency. In this session, Holly will dive into some of the technical underpinnings of Quarkus’s efficiency. She’ll give advice for those using or considering Quarkus - should you be doing reactive programming? Do native binaries run fastest? The talk includes some theory (what underpins Quarkus’s surprising throughput?) and also live demos (does Quarkus really start faster than a light bulb? What does an integration testing flow with Quarkus look like?)



Talk 2 - Ashu Swami, Principle Application Engineer at Discover

Supercharge Your Java Development with GitHub Copilot

With a series of short demos, Ashu will guide you through the secret sauce of how GitHub Copilot works in your IDE.

Getting the best from AI tools takes more than a simple prompt, and Copilot is no exception. This interactive, live session will take you on a tour through the details of Copilot and leave you with a deeper understanding of how to steer it effectively. You’ll learn what’s really happening behind the scenes, how Copilot interprets your code context, and what makes it sometimes brilliant—and sometimes baffling.

By the end of the session, you’ll know how to craft better prompts, understand Copilot’s limitations, and unlock practical techniques to make it your most productive coding partner rather than a random autocomplete engine.



Talk 3 - Steve Poole, Director of Communities at the London Java Community

The Enemy Within: How AI is Weaponizing Your Code

AI-generated code has become a double-edged sword, offering unparalleled productivity while quietly introducing vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Whether through poisoned models, maliciously crafted to inject flaws or poor-quality training data, your trusted AI companion could be a Trojan horse. This talk unveils the dark side of AI in software development, exposing how attackers exploit AI to compromise open-source projects and infiltrate the software supply chain.

Learn how bad actors leverage sophisticated techniques to embed security flaws in libraries you trust, and discover how untested, AI-generated solutions can open doors to catastrophic exploits. In the battle for secure software, your tools could be your greatest weakness or your first line of defence. Prepare to confront the chilling truth about AI and your code



Bios:

Holly Cummins

https://hollycummins.com/

Holly Cummins is a Senior Principal Software Engineer on the IBM Quarkus team and a Java Champion. Over her career, Holly has been a full-stack javascript developer, a build architect, a client-facing consultant, a JVM performance engineer, and an innovation leader. Holly has led projects to understand climate risks, count fish, help a blind athlete run ultra-marathons in the desert solo, and invent stories (although not at all the same time). She gets worked up about sustainability, technical empathy, extreme programming, the importance of proper testing, and automating all the things.


Ashu Swami, Principal Application Engineer, Discover

Ashu Swami is an Oracle Certified Java Professional and holds multiple AWS certifications with over 18 years of experience in software development. She currently works as a Principal Application Engineer at Discover Financial Services, UK, specialising in Java, Spring Boot, RESTful Microservices, and AWS cloud solutions. Ashu has a strong background in finance and insurance, delivering scalable, secure, and high-performance enterprise applications. Ashu is a big AI tools enthusiast, passionate about leveraging AI and Cloud technologies to enhance Software delivery and quality.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashu-swami-53878716/


Steve Poole, Community Director for the London Java Community. Steve is a Developer Advocate, DevOps practitioner and a long time Java developer, leader and evangelist. He’s been working on Java SDKs and JVMs since Java was less than one year old. https://www.linkedin.com/in/noregressions/



Location

The Ark

Ground Floor Café

201 Talgarth Rd, London W6 8BJ, UK


This event is organised by RecWorks on behalf of the London Java Community.

The London Java Community is sponsored by Hazelcast, Neo4j, Redis, and Discover

You can see our latest jobs here

You can see our privacy policy here

Continue the conversation at our Slack Group: https://londonjavacommunity.slack.com

Sign up here if you're not a member: https://bcrw.typeform.com/to/IIyQxd

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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Discover, 201 Talgarth Road, London, United Kingdom

Tickets

GBP 0.00

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