2026 buying us open tickets

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Last year I wrote a blog complaining about my failed attempt to buy US Open tickets. It’s a year later. Time to blog about it went this year!

Grounds Pass

knew from last year that you had to be on ticketmaster a few minutes before 9am to get a random spot in the queue when it opened at 9am. I was. I got number 48! Lucky me.!

I knew I wanted to buy grounds passes for one day and Arthur Ashe tickets for another. And from last year, I knew that the grounds passes would sell out faster. So I started with grounds. I put them in my cart and it worked. (Last year, they sold out while I was putting them in my cart.) I wasn’t confident that navigating to the Ashe tickets would keep these grounds passes so I took the risk of checking out with just those. Worked great. I gave my American Express card. (you have to pay by amex as it was the amex presale.

I got prompted for an “Amex Safekey Verification Code” which was a number texted to me. Last year, i didn’t get this for Amex. I did get it for another card whre the code didn’t arrive so this was an improvement.

Ashe Ticket

Then I went to buy my Ashe ticket. I did get dumped in the queue again. I don’t know what would have happened if I went to this page with the grounds passes in my shopping cart but I was too afraid to find out. This time I was number 13,567 in the queue. That was just over 90 minutes of waiting. (Last year 2200 was 40 minutes of waiting so definitely a faster rate.) This was fine; I kept it on one screen while I did work until it was my turn.

There was a good selection of tickets at different price points, sections, heights when I got in. Last year, I was annoyed that you only get told the section and row numbers (vs the actual seat number) when buying the ticket. I’m not a fan of that system and it is back. I suppose this helps them manage concurrency but as a customer I like knowing which seat number. In particular, I like to sit in the vicinity of the aisle so I don’t have to climb over a dozen people when it is time to go to tthe bathroom. I wound up with a seat 5 away from the aisle which I’m ok with. But It feels like gambling.

Conclusion to last year

I was able to buy the grounds passes closer to the time when they released more. But it was a project to keep checking. Also my friend and I monitored the morning of to see when the “resellers” would drop their prices. After all, we live nearby so good information for future years. (I won’t pay above face value but if they dropped it to that point, I would.) Moot point. They did not drop the prices. Even 5 minutes before the seats could no longer be sold they were well about face value. At which point their value went to $0 and the “resellers” lost all remaining value. They must make enough from people willing to pay inflated prices that it is worth eating the loss so people know they prices won’t come down.

java playground and jshell

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Today I learned that it looks like the Java Playground uses JShell. I knew it didn’t require a class/main method wrapper.

The reason I discovered this was because of the following code:

Consumer p = (p) -> {int var = 3; var++; return;};

In my IDE or at the command line, this code gives an error

Lambda.java:2: error: variable p is already defined in method main()
Consumer p = (p) -> {int var = 3; var++; return;};

In JShell and Java Playground, it happily compiles. This matters because I was told that the flashcards with my book has an errata and that “p” is just fine.

The Java Language specification writes about shadowing:

It is a compile-time error if the name of a formal parameter is used to declare a new variable within the body of the method, constructor, or lambda expression, unless the new variable is declared within a class or interface declaration contained by the method, constructor, or lambda expression

Lesson to readers: don’t use jshell when studying for the exam.

[javaone 2026] ask the java architects

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See the table of contents

Notes

  • Types of features: language, JVM, library
  • Structured concurrency – getting close. A few tweaks remained so went with another preview. Seventh preview is Java 27. Re-previewed without changes at first and then all the changes occurred together. Similarly with HTTP client. People don’t always pay attention at first. Feedback is not “why don’t you do it another way”. it’s “I tried it and x”. Just because preview doesn’t mean not production ready.
  • Project Babylon – “It’ll be ready when it is ready” Flow: submitted, candidate, target. Want to get code to be incubated. Use cases are incredibly broad. Need community to try it in a range of use cases and report back on how went.
  • Infinite number of things could work on and finite resources so prioritization problem. Some things only JDK can do and some things can be done by a library. The JDK only ones are higher priority because nobody else can do them. Also look at other languages to see if gaps.
  • Need to decide what libraries should be included. “Batteries included” like XML and JSON support. Virtual threads output format is JSON. Configuring the JDK through property files is out of the 90s. Adding JSON config would be great which motivates adding JSON parsing to the JDK. Won’t be as full featured as a full parsing library, but core library to have some support.
  • Don’t grab a library from outside and dump it in the JDK. Tried several times and get burned by it followed by an expensive process to remove. Maintained on own schedule/priorities. Recipe for stagnation.
  • A feature being added should make existing features stronger, not make them look bad. Such as lambdas which made interfaces stronger.
  • Module system not loved. Build tool support issue; similarly for starting an agent. So people use libraries instead of agents. Also benefits of modules, not enticing enough as they stand right now. Story of modules not over. Useful building block and lots of new features can add on top of them. JDK itself was modularized A lot of libraries didn’t modularized. Dream was people would jlink their application and use that in their docker container. Framework with pakcages in different jars has to redesign itself. And if library doesn’t modularize, not useful for apps to do. Spring did modularize.
  • java.lang.unsafe is still available. JDK internal packages not available.
  • Performance of streaming API. Hand specialized streams like IntStream, LongString. Not a sustainable approach. Started down path to Valhalla. Stream API is for expressing code clearly. Customize most performance critical loops.
  • Want API to encourage writing code that makes sense to humans and also makes for good machine code. Sometimes these conflict. Sometimes leads to pattern of a bunch of setup and then press the big red button.
  • People running library choose how – ex: classpath, modified JVM. Can’t solve problems by getting rid of the classpath. People are very attached. When lock something down, people come with pitchforks. With this pitchfork for not locking things down.
  • Lombok is trying to solved a reasonable problem. Lombok is ill behaved in hacking into unspecified interfaces and changing ASTs used by compiler. Largely solving yesterdays problem like mutable JavaBeans which have discouraged for a long time. When generate Java code with lombok, have to de-lombok it.
  • Header size shrunk from 12 to 8 bytes. Should be memory depending on fragmentation. Need to try and measure to see how works.
  • Go has own build tools that control. This isn’t something only the language creators can do. Recognize as problem and consider a high priority. Very few people maintain the Maven core/plugins.
  • Pet projects – I like the one about generating hash codes
  • The question isn’t can AI help; it’s how can it best help. People experiment as pet projects and management led projects.
  • Open source projects suffering from drive by PRs with AI agents running around leaving. Open JDK setup in way that makes it harder. Be careful if AI generates code and unit tests; need to make sure they are legit and not sabotaged unit tests that “pass”. Still need to look over AIs shoulder and sometimes take the wheel. Maybe next year behavior will be different.
  • Amdhal’s law – If you can speed up one part of a serial process, limited in total speed up of remaining time.
  • All about backward compatibility. Not going to redesign and start over. What is so good that is worth sacrificing. If so good, multi step migration path.
  • In most cases, kids aren’t picking the first language; their teachers are. Biggest impediment is perception comparing Python of today to Java of 15 years ago. Need more awareness of new features. Harder to reach educators than developers

Humor:

  • “do you have any thoughts”
  • “we have lots of thoughts”
  • ‘ideas are cheap I heard”

My take

Great end to the conference! People asked good questions so it was interesting and fun. It paired nicely with Brian’s keynote yesterday which was more philosophical and this gave an opportunity to go deeper. And got to have back references to John’s session immediately before. Really enjoyed the perspectives and insights.