Bob Treacy: From the Factory Floor to Harvard and 30 Years of Java

Bob Treacy started his career as a union steward on the factory floor at GE Aircraft Engines. After earning a BS and MS in Computer Science from Boston University while working and raising a family at the same time, he jumped to software, never looked back, and remains at the cutting edge with Java and AI. Now Principal Software Architect and Data Engineer at Harvard University, he has been writing Java since 1995 and has attended more than 20 JavaOne conferences. So, he's lived much of the entire life of Java.  At JavaOne 2026 this week he'll present work from Harvard's Dataverse project, which uses LLM embeddings and a graph database knowledge graph to recommend metadata categories for research datasets.  The conversation also covers Java's long evolution, his pragmatic view of AI, and his advice to students to make sure they understand full systems and not just be exclusively a coder. Bob Tracey: LinkedIn | Jim Grisanzio: LinkedIn, X/Twitter