Senior Developer Category • Published December 12, 2024 • Amsterdam, Netherlands
Winner: Sarah van den Berg
The jury unanimously selected Sarah van den Berg as the winner of the 2024 Dutch Java Developer Award in the Senior Developer category, recognizing her outstanding contributions to the Dutch Java ecosystem.
"Sarah's work on the monolith-to-microservices migration at ING Bank represents exactly the kind of technical leadership our industry needs. Her event-driven architecture processing over 2 million daily transactions demonstrates both deep technical expertise and practical engineering judgment." — Prof. dr. Erik Meijer, Jury Chair
Jury Evaluation
The evaluation considered technical excellence, community impact, and innovation. Sarah scored highest across all three dimensions:
Technical Excellence (9.2/10) — Production-proven microservices architecture at scale, deep Java 17 and Spring Boot 3 expertise
Community Impact (8.8/10) — Speaker at J-Fall 2024, mentor to junior developers, active contributor to open-source Java tooling
Innovation (9.0/10) — Novel approach to event-driven data pipelines combining Kafka and AWS EKS
Acceptance Speech
Sarah's acceptance speech at J-Fall 2024 focused on the importance of mentoring the next generation of Java developers in the Netherlands. "The Dutch tech community gave me everything — it's our responsibility to give back."