Title: Life in the trenches, or The Agony and The Ecstasy of Making a Contribution to OpenJDK Abstract: We've been working on OpenJDK for a long time now and we've gained a lot of experience working on the code itself and, perhaps more importantly, working with the Java team inside Oracle. This talk is about our experiences trying make one of the largest ever external contributions to OpenJDK, the AArch64 port. I'll talk about how the OpenJDK contribution process works, and how it doesn't work, and how important it is to gain the trust of people inside Oracle's Java team. I'll discuss the strange asymmetry of being an external contributor to a project but not being able to know all of what is going on. I'll try my best to explain the baffling role of Projects and JEPs. I'll speculate about the future of OpenJDK and how it must change as more people outside Oracle contribute significant slabs of code, and how we must have more external patch reviewers. Finally, I'll open up the floor for discussion. I'm sure we'll have a lot to talk about. Andrew.