For the JavaLand x Women in Tech series, Ixchel Ruiz has interviewed female speakers of the upcoming JavaLand 2026 at Europa-Park. These speaker spotlights give you the opportunity to get to know the speaker better and get their valuable input and insight on current topics. You can find more background information regarding the Women in Tech movement as well as Ixchel’s motivation behind it in our previous article.
Session Title:Getting more out of Maven
Time: Tuesday, 10.03.2026 | 16:00 – 16:40
Room: Dome
Language: English
Focus: Tooling & Developer Productivity
A question many developers should ask
Maven is everywhere in the Java ecosystem. For many teams, it is simply there, quietly doing its job in the background. You write some XML, run a build, and move on.
Until something breaks.
As projects grow, Maven configurations tend to grow with them. Suddenly you are dealing with lifecycles, plugins, dependency resolution, parent and child POMs, and profiles. It becomes harder to understand what is happening and why. Marit van Dijk’s session at JavaLand 2026 starts from this familiar situation and asks a practical question: how can developers really get more out of Maven in their day-to-day work?
Meet the speaker: Marit van Dijk
Marit van Dijk is a Java Champion and Developer Advocate at JetBrains with more than twenty years of experience in software development. She is passionate about building great software with great people and about helping developers work more effectively with the tools they use every day.
Marit regularly speaks at international conferences and shares her knowledge through webinars, podcasts, blog posts, videos, and tutorials. She is also a contributor to “97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know”, reflecting her long-standing commitment to practical learning and knowledge sharing within the Java community.
Why Marit brought this conversation to JavaLand
Maven remains the most widely used build tool in the JVM ecosystem, yet many developers never move beyond a basic understanding of how it works. This session, co-presented with Andres Almiray, comes from a desire to close that gap.
Marit and Andres look at Maven from two angles. They explain how Maven’s build lifecycle, plugins, and dependency management really fit together. At the same time, they show how IntelliJ IDEA can make working with Maven much more approachable through features like navigation, code completion, and custom run configurations.
This session is geared towards developers and IT professionals who want to reduce the time they spend on build setup and focus more on actual development work.
The One Idea she wants you to take home
The core message of the session is simple: to be effective, you need to understand Maven and your IDE, and know how they work together.
While you don't need to memorise every Maven detail, you do need to familiarise yourself with the concepts behind your build. Combining this understanding with the support your IDE provides makes everyday tasks easier and helps you to diagnose problems more quickly.
For Marit, achieving this balance allows developers to work with confidence instead of frustration.
Her perspective: Advice from a Woman in Tech
Even after more than two decades in IT, Marit still considers collaboration to be the most valuable part of her work. Whether she is part of a development team, contributing to open-source projects, or preparing talks like this one, collaborating with others remains central to her learning process.
Her advice to the community is simple: find people to share your learning journey with. Collaborating with others helps you to see problems from different angles and exposes you to ideas that you might not encounter alone. It also makes work more enjoyable.
For Marit, shared learning is an essential part of a tech career. It is one of the most reliable ways to continue growing over time.
Why JavaLand is the right place for this talk
What Marit looks forward to most at JavaLand is the people. The informal conversations in the hallways often lead to the most interesting exchanges, where developers talk openly about what they are building and the challenges they are facing.
JavaLand’s open and welcoming atmosphere makes it an ideal place for a session focused on practical tooling, shared experience, and learning together as a community.
Join the conversation
This session is an invitation to take a closer look at tools many developers use every day and to discover how much more effective they can be when used with intention.
If you want to get more out of Maven, make better use of IntelliJ IDEA, and exchange experiences with other developers, this talk will give you both practical insights and space for conversation. Bring your questions and your curiosity to JavaLand 2026 and be part of the discussion.
This article’s grammar and syntax were refined using ChatGPT and DeepL. The content reflects the speaker’s ideas, hopes, and statements.
