Instrument to Remove: Using Java agents for fun and profit by Johannes Bechberger

Have you ever written a Java agent? This talk will give you an introduction into writing small custom Java agents to create profilers or help with dead code removal, and how to write basic byte-code instrumentations. I'll present you with all the techniques to write a Java agent and javassist based instrumentation code to find unused classes and dependencies in your project. Knowing which classes and dependencies are not used in your application can save you from considering the bugs and problems in these dependencies and classes if you remove them, helping to guard against supply chain attacks. Java agents and instrumentation of a few lines of code can save you a lot of effort and implementing them is great fun 🙂