Duke’s Corner Java Podcast: Trisha Gee: It’s all about Relationships and People
Jim Grisanzio from Java Developer Relations talks with Trisha Gee, an author, a Java Champion, and a Developer Advocate at Gradle. In February 2025 at Jfokus in Stockholm Trisha received the Java Community Lifetime Achievement Award from Sharat Chander from Oracle Java Developer Relations. Trisha has been a Java developer for 25 years, and since 2011 she’s been actively blogging, presenting technical sessions at conferences, and evangelizing Java globally. Recently, Trisha has moved from a traditional developer advocate role to more of a facilitator of developer advocacy internally at her company as well as externally. She works with engineering teams, marketing, teams, and sales teams to ensure the voice of the developer resonates throughout the organization and the community. Trisha is always evolving, she’s constantly growing.
In this conversation we talk about the JVM, the six month Java release cycle, writing code, the unique features that make Java special as a technology and as a community, Generative AI, design patterns, understanding requirements, asking questions, problem solving, edge cases, documentation, testing, open source, standards, advice for students, and teaching her 9-year old how to code in Java. Trisha is fascinated with the entire development life cycle of software projects and especially the skills developers need now for working with AI.
Here are some links where the interview can be found online: Apple | Flickr | Substack | LinkedIn | LinkedIn | WordPress | WordPress | X | X | YouTube. Here’s the full transcript of the conversation. Below are some quotes from the conversation.
Sharat Chander’s Community Impact
00:03:02 – 00:03:37
Context: Trisha discusses receiving the Java Community Lifetime Achievement honors from Sharat Chander at Jfokus 2025, emphasizing his role in fostering a collaborative and inclusive Java community.
Quote: “It feels like a very personal thing from him. [Shar’s] such a huge powerhouse in the community. Obviously, he cares about the technology, but he understands that the technology isn’t enough. It is about individuals stepping up but not doing stuff for themselves, doing stuff to enable other people, to empower other people. It’s the community that makes it a great place to be. And Shar is such a huge champion of that. He makes you feel really appreciated for making the efforts to help others and to be involved in the community.”
Developer Advocacy Role Evolution
00:06:07 – 00:08:36
Context: Trisha explains her current role as head of developer advocacy at Gradle, highlighting how she bridges the gap between developers, marketing, and sales to amplify the developer’s voice in the organization and throughout the community.
Quote: “I’m doing more strategic thinking for Gradle. It’s one thing for a developer advocate to go off and say, here’s what’s new in Java. It’s another thing for a senior advocate to work with the head of marketing to say, our messaging to developers needs to be more like this or that. This is what the developers care about. But the guys who are paying … they might not know what that means. So this is kind of how you bridge the gap between what the developers care about and what the people with the money care about.”
Developers as Problem Solvers
00:14:14 – 00:16:19
Context: Trisha discusses the misconception that developers primarily write code, emphasizing that their true core skill is problem-solving, especially in the context of Generative AI.
Quote: “The naive way of thinking about what developers do is that we generate code, we write code. But it’s not the same thing. … It’s not the writing of the code, the typing of the code that really slows us down. It’s understanding what is the real problem, what are the weird edge cases, how do I get it to fit inside my current application, what design patterns do we have … The job of the developer has always been to say, what do you really want? And how can I give it to you within the constraints of the existing system, organization, and team?”
The Art of Asking Questions
00:18:04 – 00:18:26
Context: Trisha reflects on the importance of questioning as a critical skill for developers, noting how junior developers’ curiosity can drive innovation.
Quote: “The best genius I’ve ever worked with ask really good questions. And that’s where, like this idea of, asking questions and not taking anything for granted is not just for senior experienced people. It’s a mindset that we need to come with. … It’s a really good skill.”
Java’s Enduring Strengths
00:19:35 – 00:23:25
Context: Trisha explains why Java remains relevant after 30 years, highlighting its technical strengths and the supportive community that fosters innovation and inclusion.
Quote: “There’s a number of things. I think it’s a combination of the technology and the community. Write once, run anywhere is one of the things that kind of helped it get started. The JVM is designed for performance. And then we’ve got the ecosystem of Open Source, but also standards, which stops things going absolutely crazy. It feels like whoever you are, whatever kind of programmer you are, there’s something there for you. And there’s a kind of inclusion in all of that. Like, we’re all here, we’re all here to help each other. And that is a very difficult thing to leave behind and go somewhere else.”
Six-Month Release Cycle Benefits
00:26:53 – 00:30:18
Context: Trisha discusses how Java’s six-month release cycle enables incremental improvements, citing examples like Project Loom and pattern matching.
Quote: “Since we moved to two releases a year, we’ve been able to release incremental steps towards improving the language and the JVM without having to do like a big piece of work and then release it in a version of Java. Doing things in a small incremental way allows you to get faster feedback, allows you to iterate and allows you to deliver something better. And I think we can really see that in the two releases a year with Java.”
Teaching Java to a Nine-Year-Old
00:31:46 – 00:34:09
Context: Trisha shares her experience teaching her nine-year-old daughter Java using modern tools like IntelliJ IDEA and resources like Head First Java, highlighting how accessible learning has become.
Quote: “I was just teaching my nine-year-old how to code Java, obviously. She gets the IDE straight away. … Things have changed a bit since I learned how to code, but not that much. You can teach the old school way of like, here’s a main method. … And you can teach the basics of the IDE to help lighten the mental load for someone learning it for the first time.”
Advice for New Developers
00:36:28 – 00:38:15
Context: Trisha offers advice to new developers, emphasizing the importance of embracing continuous learning and being comfortable with not knowing everything.
Quote: “The overwhelming thing for a lot of these junior devs is that they realize they know very little and they need to learn a lot. … The most important skill to come out with after learning to program is learning how to learn and learning to be comfortable with the fact that you don’t know it all — and you will never know it all.”
Final Thoughts on Programming
00:38:53 – 00:39:32
Context: Trisha summarizes her key takeaways, emphasizing that programming is about community, continuous learning, and embracing discomfort for growth.
Quote: “Programming is about writing code into the computer, but that’s not your key skill. Programming is about the community, the people, the network you make. … The more you learn to be uncomfortable and to work within that discomfort and embrace it, I think the sort of the more successful you’ll be.”
Java 25’s Incremental Improvements
00:26:35 – 00:28:39
Context: Trisha comments on Java 25, noting that while she’s not as focused on individual releases as before, the six-month release cycle allows for small, impactful changes that make the language more approachable and improve developer experience.
Quote: “I’m not as on top of each individual release as I used to be. … But in some ways, that distance gives me a different lens to answer that question. Since we moved to two releases a year, … each one has at least one thing in it which is kind of cool and new and maybe syntax that we haven’t used before or maybe a performance under the covers.”
Learning Through Modern Resources
00:35:17 – 00:35:46
Context: Trisha discusses how modern resources, like YouTube channels and interactive tools, make learning Java more accessible, especially for those who struggle with traditional reading or non-native English speakers.
Quote: “There’s so many more different ways of learning these days. … If reading is a struggle for you … then there’s a whole bunch of YouTube channels and you can learn more visually. You don’t have to just read dry code on a piece of paper. You can see interactively how things are going to work, and I think that’s cool.”
Embracing Growth in Learning
00:10:36 – 00:13:27
Context: Trisha reflects on her own personal growth and passion for continuous learning, explaining how her career evolved from coding to advocacy to engaging with diverse teams, driven by a desire to grow and solve problems.
Quote: “I’m always looking to grow. I’m always looking for growth. I am constantly evolving and constantly growing. … It’s really a selfish thing. How can I help developers be happier? Well, I need to be able to speak to the folks who pay our salaries so that they can learn what makes us happy.”
JVM’s Performance Advantage
00:24:26 – 00:25:26
Context: Trisha highlights the JVM’s efficiency for high-performance applications, recounting her experience at a low-latency trading platform where Java’s performance was leveraged without needing specialized code.
Quote: “The JVM is designed for performance. … If you write good readable Java code with small methods, not too many nested like conditionals or too many weird for loops, you’ll get good performance from Java out of the box. You’ll get better performance out of the box than writing it in anything else.”
OpenJDK’s Incremental Progress
00:27:14 – 00:27:40
Context: Trisha references OpenJDK’s Project Loom as an example of how the six-month release cycle allows for incremental concurrency improvements, benefiting developers through iterative feedback and development.
Quote: “The ability to split Loom into a series of different deliverables which are going to improve concurrency. … Thinking about it in terms of what can we incrementally release, how can we separate this into individual things, has allowed the engineers to make incremental improvements that can be used by developers.”
