Let’s abuse the tools! Everyone knows Quarkus is computationally efficient, expressive, and rock-solid for production. But did you know that we can use Quarkus efficiency to build applications that shouldn’t go anywhere near production? In this demo-driven session, Holly will put the joy into “developer joy”. She’ll show you all sorts of things you can do with Quarkus that you probably shouldn’t:

• Build an LLM-powered app that’s guaranteed to hallucinate, because you can do more than you think with guardrails, and truth is so boring

• Write your business code in rockstarlang, because everything should be a hair metal ballad

• Use Minecraft as your observability client, because the LGTM stack doesn’t have enough explosions

• Write a CLI for generating memes faster, because everything is better on the command-line

• Benchmark an application against a grapefruit, because metric units aren’t tasty

Business value? Learning? If you insist. As well as absurd demos, you’ll leave this session with a deeper understanding of how to get the most out of Quarkus and Java. There will be new Java 25 language features, Quarkus best practices, powerful integrations, and nifty use cases alongside the silly explosions and grapefruit.