Compară On 23 October, our Bucharest office welcomed members of the Bucharest Java User Group for an evening of insightful talks, meaningful connections, and shared passion for innovation. The event was organised by the Incremental Development community, as part of a broader series of community meetups we've proudly supported throughout the year, each one designed to foster dialogue, spark ideas, and strengthen the bonds within Romania’s vibrant tech ecosystem.
This time we welcomed three experts who offered fresh perspectives on smarter learning, modular architecture, and event-driven systems with Kafka.
Meet the speakers
Simone de Gijt is a Java and Kotlin developer at OpenValue Amsterdam. She’s known for her technical expertise and social energy, and she’s passionate about learning, collaboration, and sharing ideas.
Mihăiță (Miță) Țintă has over 15 years of experience in tech, delivering mobile and web applications. He’s a lifelong learner with a keen interest in architecture and modular design.
Andrei Rugină has been shaping ING Romania’s digital platforms since 2007. He’s passionate about messaging systems, DDD, and clean design patterns that make complex systems maintainable.
What they brought to the table
Talk #1: Hack your brain – smarter learning for devs | Simone de Gijt, Kotlin & Java developer @OpenValue Amsterdam
Simone explored how neuroscience can help developers learn smarter, not harder. She shared practical strategies to boost focus, improve retention, and structure coding sessions for maximum impact. She deconstructed the mechanisms of learning, through the lens of a trained neuroscientist. And talked the audience through planning their learning to make use of prime time.
The talk ended with a couple of practical exercises, such as reading chunks of code and attempting to reproduce them from memory, and some low-effort hacks devs can apply in their everyday lives.
Talk #2: Implementing domain events with Kafka | Andrei Rugină, software architect @ING Bank Romania
Andrei introduced the participants to Domain Driven Design (DDD) for microservices, as a way to improve their resilience and fault tolerance. Discussing design rules, he clarified where to draw context bounds and why Kafka fits the use case of domain-driven microservices, through its persistence, at-least-once delivery and pub-sub pattern.
He took the audience through the outbox pattern and the theory behind constructing domain events for use with reactive applications, leading up to the next speaker’s hands-on discussion.
Talk #3: From strategic design to modular, eventful, and reliable systems | Mihăiță (Miță) Țintă, chapter lead engineer @ING Hubs Romania
Mihăiţă walked the participants through the journey from strategic modelling to a real, working application using event passing and Kafka. Building on points made by Andrei before, Miţă started by exploring how Impact Mapping outlines what features need to be delivered to respond to customers' needs.
He followed through by explaining Event Storming as a way to understand and model an application's internal interactions. Through a live demo, Miţă demonstrated how to modularize an application and make it more resilient to errors and failures, improving not just maintainability, but also allowing asynchronous behaviour and live error handling.
His hands-on approach illustrates how devs can understand complex systems and build reliable software by using event storming and event-driven code.
