On 26 May 2026, our researchers Catarina Gamboa and Ricardo Costa, PhD and MSc students, respectively, presented their work on LiquidJava at the developer conference JNation, showcasing LASIGE’s research outside the academic community and sharing it with engineers across the country.
JNation is one of the largest software development conferences in Portugal, held annually at the Convento São Francisco in Coimbra, Portugal. The event brings together more than 1,000 developers, engineers, and architects to explore advanced topics in Java, JavaScript, Cloud computing, DevOps, Security, and Artificial Intelligence. It features multi-track technical sessions, hands-on workshops, and major corporate networking, serving as a primary hub for tech innovation in the region.
This year featured more than 50 speakers, most of them from industry, including big tech companies such as JetBrains, IBM, and Microsoft. Catarina and Ricardo presented LiquidJava: Catch Bugs at Compile Time with Liquid Types, demonstrating live how LiquidJava extends Java’s type system with refinement types and typestates to catch entire classes of bugs before a program runs. The talk included live coding demos using the LiquidJava VS Code extension.
For Ricardo, this was a great first experience: “It was my first time speaking at a conference, and it was a great experience presenting our work to a large audience and meeting people from the community.”
Beyond the networking, presenting this research at JNation was “a great opportunity to put LiquidJava in front of the audience it is ultimately designed for: practitioners building real software, and this direct engagement with the developer community is essential for validating the tool’s usability and for shaping research direction going forward”, as Catarina reported.
Catarina also gave an interview for the conference, in which she discussed LiquidJava, the motivation behind the project, and the importance of bringing research prototypes closer to developers through improved tooling and usability. Both the talk and interview recordings are available on the conference’s YouTube channel.
