Phillip Krüger

About

About me

Phillip Krüger: software engineer at Red Hat living in Victoria, Australia. Quarkus Dev UI, Chappie, Dev MCP and Agent MCP, plus MicroProfile, SmallRye, Java, Linux and open source. Skills, talks, articles and conferences.

Hey, I'm Phillip. I'm a Software Engineer living in Victoria, Australia.

I work for Red Hat on the Quarkus team, where I spend most of my time on developer tooling: the Dev UI, Chappie, Dev MCP and the Quarkus Agent MCP. I also work on MicroProfile and SmallRye.

I am a fan of technology, coffee and programming. I love dogs and music. To keep active I play squash. I was lucky enough to marry my best friend, Charmaine. She is also a geek.

Phillip, Charmaine and their daughter

I am an INTJ Myers-Briggs psychological type and have the following strengths:

  • Strategic
  • Analytical
  • Deliberative
  • Achiever
  • Relator

My professional skills

I am an accomplished software developer and architect with experience in creating systems in various industries, ranging from banking, insurance, rewards programs, retail and mobile. I have extensive experience in full stack development, and prefer to be active in all parts of the SDLC, from conceptualising to running in production. I have a passion for clean code and evolutionary architecture. I love Java, Linux and open source.

ACS Certified Professional

Experience

Quarkus developer tooling

At Red Hat I am part of the Quarkus team. I work on the tools you use while a Quarkus application runs in dev mode. They started as tools for developers and now also serve AI coding agents.

Dev UI

The Dev UI is the web console for a Quarkus application in dev mode. It shows the extensions, configuration and runtime data of the running application and lets you act on it without a restart. Extensions add their own pages using web components and talk to the running application over JSON-RPC. I lead the development of the Dev UI.

Chappie

Chappie is the Quarkus Assistant. It adds AI to dev mode through the Dev UI and the CLI: help when an exception occurs, generated tests and JavaDoc, and explanations of your code. It works with OpenAI compatible services or a local Ollama, and it loads the Quarkus documentation for the version you are running so the answers have context. I started the Chappie working group in January 2025.

Dev MCP

Dev MCP is a Model Context Protocol server that runs inside a Quarkus application in dev mode. The Dev UI and MCP both use JSON-RPC, so the same tools and data the Dev UI shows can be offered to an AI agent as MCP tools and resources. Extension authors mark the methods they want to expose, and the agent can then inspect the running application or change things like log levels.

Quarkus Agent MCP

The Quarkus Agent MCP is a standalone MCP server for AI coding agents such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor and JetBrains AI. It runs as a separate process, so it keeps working when the application crashes. An agent can use it to create a project, start, stop and restart the application, read the logs, search the Quarkus documentation, learn extension patterns from skills, and reach the Dev MCP tools of the running application. I introduced it in May 2026 as part of the DevStar working group on the Quarkus developer experience for AI coding agents.

Java, Java EE and MicroProfile

I have been writing Java since the beginning of Java and still love it. I stay up to date with the language and specifications. I have extensive experience in Enterprise Java, including JAX-RS, JAX-WS, CDI, JAXB, JAXP, XML, JSON-P, JSON, JPA, JDBC, EJB, JTA, JCA, JMS, JSF, JSP, Servlets, WebSockets, Bean Validation, Portlets, Spring, Swagger, Lombok, GraphQL and much more.

When appropriate, I use Eclipse MicroProfile APIs to build more cloud-friendly applications, including Config, Fault Tolerance, Health, Metrics, OpenAPI, REST Client, JWT RBAC, OpenTracing and GraphQL.

Open source

Everything I do at Red Hat is open source and my work is visible on GitHub. Besides the Quarkus tooling above, I contribute to Eclipse MicroProfile and SmallRye, where I mostly work on MicroProfile GraphQL and MicroProfile Extensions.

I previously also contributed to JSR 371, the Model-View-Controller Specification, and Ozark, the reference implementation.

Linux

I have been running Linux on my personal PC since 1999, starting with Mandrake, and then went through many distributions including Red Hat, OpenSUSE, Debian and PCLinuxOS. I then discovered Gentoo Linux, and went from a basic desktop user to being comfortable with building my own OS on my PC. I also used Ubuntu and Mint. For the past few years I have been using Arch Linux and loving it. At work I am running a nice stable Fedora distro with KDE. I am comfortable running and managing Linux servers and Docker containers.

Communication

I enjoy talking and debating about technical concerns. I blog about technical topics and session feedback from conferences. I also enjoy presenting technical topics in forums. I am comfortable running technical meetings and finding solutions around a whiteboard.

Talks

Published blog articles

Some of my posts were also published on Quarkus.io, Java Code Geeks and DZone.

Infrastructure

I enjoy setting up and automating the environments that my systems need to run: MySQL, PostgreSQL, DB2, OpenRDF, Elasticsearch, WildFly, GlassFish and Payara, TomEE, WAS Liberty, Pluto and more.

Tools

I have been using many tools through the years. Currently these are some of my favourites: Git, Gogs, Jenkins, Travis CI, Nexus, SonarQube, Maven, Ansible, NetBeans, Atom, Hugo, Jekyll, Eclipse and Docker.

Other

I have knowledge of many other languages, frameworks and libraries. I believe in using the right tool for the job and can learn a new specification, language or framework quickly and easily. Some of these include HTML5, CSS3, Sass and Less, Markdown, JavaScript, Semantic UI, Bootstrap, Foundation, PHP, SVG, XSLT, SQL, RDF, SPARQL, Webjars, OPML, Atom and RSS, Apache Cordova and more.

Conferences I attended

Phillip presenting a talk in a lecture theatre

Get in touch

The quickest way to reach me is email. You can also find me on GitHub and LinkedIn.

Email me