Paul Bakker: Go Build a Lot of Stuff! cover art

Paul Bakker: Go Build a Lot of Stuff!

Paul Bakker: Go Build a Lot of Stuff!

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 This is the third in a short series of speaker profiles for JavaOne 2026 in Redwood Shores, California, March 17-19. Get early bird pricing until February 9, and for a limited time, take advantage of a $100 discount by using this code at checkout: J12026IJN100. Register. Sessions. In this conversation, Jim Grisanzio from Java Developer Relations talks with Paul Bakker, an engineer and Java architect in California. Paul is a staff software engineer in the Java Platform team at Netflix. He works on improving the Java stack and tooling used by all Netflix microservices and was one of the original authors of the DGS (GraphQL) Framework. He is also a Java Champion, he's published two books about Java modularity, and he's a speaker at conferences and Java User Groups. Java Is Everywhere at Netflix Paul will present "How Netflix Uses Java: 2026 Edition" at JavaOne in March. The session updates previous year's talk because Java keeps evolving at Netflix. "Netflix is really staying on the latest and greatest with a lot of things," Paul says. "We're trying new things. And that means there's always new stuff to learn every year." Java powers both Netflix streaming and enterprise applications used internally and supporting studio teams. "Java is everywhere at Netflix," Paul says. "All the backends, they are all Java powered." Why Java? It comes down to history and practicality. The original team members were Java experts, but more importantly, "Java is also just the best choice for us," he says. The language balances developer productivity and runtime performance. At Netflix's scale with thousands of AWS instances running production services, runtime performance is critical. Netflix engineers stay closely connected with development at OpenJDK. They test new features early and work with preview releases or builds before official releases. When virtual threads appeared, Netflix engineers tested immediately to measure performance gains. Paul says they give feedback on what works, what doesn't work, and what they would like to see different. This just demonstrates the value of being involved with OpenJDK, and Paul says they have a really nice back and forward with the Oracle engineering teams. The microservices architecture Netflix adopted years ago enabled the company to scale. This approach has become common now, but Netflix pioneered talking about it publicly. Breaking functionality into smaller pieces lets teams scale and develop services independently. Most workloads are stateless, which enables horizontal scaling. Production services for streaming often run several thousand AWS instances at a time. Early on with Java Applets Paul's coding journey started at 15 when he got his first computer and wanted to learn everything about it. Working at a computer shop repairing machines, the owner asked if he knew how to build websites. Paul said no but wanted to learn. He was curious about everything that involved computes. Java applets were hot back then. With nothing online available, he bought a book and started hacking away. "It was so much fun that I also decided right at that point basically like, oh, I'm going to be an engineer for the rest of my life," he says. That's clarity for a 15-year-old. And it's remarkable. But Paul says it felt natural. He just started doing it, had such a good time, and knew that was what he wanted to do. When he started university around 2000, right during the dot-com bubble and crash, professors warned students not to expect to make money in engineering because the bubble had burst. Paul still remembers how funny that seems now. You can never predict the future. Initially, he learned Java and PHP simultaneously. Java powered client-side applications through applets while PHP ran server-side code. The roles have completely reversed now. Engaging the Community Paul attended his first JavaOne in 2006. "Those were really good times," he says about the early conferences when everything felt big and JavaOne was the only place to learn about Java. Back then, around 20,000 people would travel to San Francisco every year. It was the one and only place to learn what was new in Java. All the major news would be released at JavaOne each year. The world has changed. Now information spreads instantly and continually online, but Paul misses something about those early days. The more recent JavaOne conferences offer something different but equally valuable. Paul points to last year's event in Redwood City as a great example. While the conference is still big, it's small enough that attendees can actually talk with the Oracle JDK engineers and have deeper conversations. The folks who work on the JDK and the Java language are all there giving presentations, but they're also totally accessible for hallway chats. "That makes it really interesting," Paul says. This direct access to the people building the platform distinguishes JavaOne from other conferences. Java User Groups also played an important role...
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