The Marco Show

Martin Lippert, longtime maintainer of Spring Tools and one of the people who has witnessed developer tooling evolve from Eclipse to VS Code, joins Marco to discuss how AI is transforming Java development, and what that means for the future of software engineering. ⏱️ Timestamps: (00:00) Teaser(00:38) Meet Martin Lippert, Spring Tools & the evolution of Java IDEs(03:28) What happened to Eclips...

Martin Odersky, creator of Scala and co-designer of Java generics, joins Marco to trace the full arc from Pizza (the 1996 functional Java experiment) to Scala 3, and on to his vision for capabilities as a safety mechanism for AI-generated code. They discuss how Scala unified object-oriented and functional programming, the Scala 2 to 3 evolution (implicits, Tasty, the new compiler), higher-kinded t...

Mohamed Aboullaite, backend engineer at Spotify, Java Champion, Google Cloud Developer Expert, and Docker Captain, joins Marco to talk about building AI-powered integrations at scale, what software engineering looks like when you're running five AI agents in parallel, and why the foundations still matter in an AI-first world. They discuss the engineering behind Spotify's ChatGPT integratio...

James Ward (Developer Advocate at AWS, Agentic AI Foundation Technical Committee Member) joins Marco to map out the fast-moving landscape of AI agents on the JVM. From MCP and ACP to Spring AI, Embabel, and Ktor — James explains how the JVM ecosystem has not only caught up with Python for building agents, but may have surpassed it. He also introduces SkillsJars (putting agent skills on Maven Centr...

Andres Almiray, Java Champion and creator of JReleaser, joins Marco to talk about the realities of open source, release automation, and the evolving Java ecosystem. They dive into what it really takes to maintain and grow open source projects, why code isn’t the most important part, and how communication, community, and sustainability determine whether projects thrive or die. The conversation also...

Moritz Halbritter, Spring Boot engineer at Broadcom and team lead for start.spring.io (Spring Initializr), joins Marco to talk about the inner workings of the Spring ecosystem and the future of Java performance. 💡 In this episode: GraalVM Native Image vs Project Leyden and Java startup performance Observability in Spring Boot (logs, metrics, tracing) Developer experience improvements: Testcontain...

Ronald Dehuysser, creator of JobRunr, joins Marco to talk about distributed job scheduling in Java, building a high-throughput background processing framework, and turning an open-source side project into a profitable business. They dive into what really happens when microservices lack distributed tracing, why dead letter queues can silently lose invoices, how JobRunr scales to thousands of jobs p...

Episode description: Thomas Wuerthinger, Founder and Project Lead of GraalVM and Vice President at Oracle, joins Marco to unpack how modern Java runtimes actually work. They explore why duplicating compilers and garbage collectors across languages is a waste of engineering effort, how GraalVM grew from a research project into production technology, and why Native Image unexpectedly became its most...

Daniel Gräfe, founder of Timing and Cotypist , joins Marco to talk about the realities of indie software development after leaving Big Tech. They discuss turning side projects into a real business, risky rewrites, subscription pricing, and how AI fits into day-to-day coding and support. Daniel shares lessons from more than a decade of building and maintaining Mac apps, including what worked, what...

J. B. Rainsberger, TDD coach and software consultant, joins Marco to challenge common assumptions about software testing. They discuss why JB argues that “integrated tests are a scam,” how testing choices affect design and refactoring, and what teams get wrong when they rely too heavily on end-to-end tests. The conversation draws on decades of real-world experience working with development teams o...

The first season of The Marco Show has officially come to an end! In this Christmas special episode, we’re announcing all of our giveaway winners and wrapping up the season with a fun Q&A with Marco. 🎁 Giveaway winners: If you’re one of the winners featured in this episode, please reach out to us at themarcoshow@jetbrains.com and let us know what you’d prefer: a 1-year license to one of our J...

Rafael Winterhalter, creator of ByteBuddy and long-time Java consultant, joins Marco to break down the hidden world of JVM bytecode instrumentation. They discuss how ByteBuddy powers tools like Mockito and Hibernate, why legacy Java still dominates enterprise systems, and what it’s really like maintaining a massive open-source project as a single developer. 💡 Topics in this episode: How ByteBuddy...

Episode description: Ludovic Orban (Jetty Maintainer and Performance Engineer at WebTide) joins Marco to break down what “web scale” really means, why most systems don’t need Google-level architecture, and how modern Java servers achieve massive throughput. From Jetty’s design philosophy to multi-core CPU realities, distributed transactions, Terracotta’s wild JVM clustering experiments, and the li...

Kevin Dubois (IBM Developer Advocate, Quarkus Team) joins Marco to explore how Quarkus is reinventing Java for the modern cloud era, and why it’s not about killing Spring Boot. From startup times to developer experience, microservices, AI, and GraalVM, this episode dives into where Java is heading in 2025 and beyond. 💡 Topics in this episode: The origins of Quarkus and why it exists Spring Boot d...

Thorben Janssen joins Marco to talk about the hidden power (and pain) of Java persistence frameworks. Hibernate, JPA, Spring Data, jOOQ: which one should you really use in 2025? From learning SQL the right way to surviving microservices madness, this episode is packed with hard-won lessons from decades of real-world Java work. 💡 Topics in this episode: Hibernate vs JPA vs Jakarta Data When to use...

Axel Fontaine, creator of Flyway, one of the most popular database migration tools, joins Marco to share how he built a global open source project, turned it into a profitable business, and sold it to Redgate. From bootstrapping alone to making millions without investors, Axel’s story is a deep dive into the business side of coding. 💡 Topics in this episode: How Flyway grew from a side project to...

📺 Note: This episode contains screensharing and live coding examples that work best visually. If you’d like to follow along, check out the full video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Qvh3VFlvJnE . Gavin King (creator of Hibernate) joins Marco to cut through the myths of Java persistence. When should you skip layers of repositories and just write SQL, or even model database views? What actuall...

Casey Muratori (programmer, educator, performance advocate) joins Marco to explore why modern software feels so slow, even with today’s powerful hardware. From the infamous Windows Terminal controversy to game server limits, billion-row challenges in Java, and his unfiltered take on AI. This episode dives deep into performance, programming culture, and what developers should really care about. 💡...

Jodie Burchell (Data Scientist) joins Marco to cut through the hype around large language models. From GPT and Gemini to Claude and beyond — how do you really choose the right one? Benchmarks, context length, hallucinations, ethics, and AGI predictions — all on the table. If you’ve ever asked yourself, “Which LLM should I use for my work?” — this conversation will help you see past the hype. 💡 To...