(republished on linkedin)

This was an extremely exciting but also an exhausting week – full of new ideas, new people I was allowed to meet and great discussions.

The final highlight of the week was my participation at this year’s DigitalXChange which is a conference for developers, UX experts and digital leads. More than 1000 people visited the conference. Speakers were divided into 16 tracks so that it was quite hard to decide which talk to attend. Topics ranged from design thinking, agile/lean movement, user experience to software architecture, devOps and software development.

My three key takeaways

“Schnellboote im Trockendock: Ein Blick unter die Haube des Opensource Projekts OpenDevStack“ by Torsten Jaeschke

The opendevstack is mainly a provisioning tool that sets up a complete development environment within minutes. This environment contains Jira, confluence, git. Furthermore, templates are included to setup up, for example, Angular or Spring Boot projects so that you can start with the development of an MVP really fast. Opendevstack is based on openshift. The idea behind the project is to separate innovation projects from compliance but to provide the ability to migrate projects back to the organisation easily. I really liked the combination of technologies and will definitely keep this open source project in mind for future prototypes.

“Evolution of API driven Architectures” by Sven Bernhardt

Add descriptionNo alt text provided for this image A really great talk which introduced the evolution of API gateways and API management platforms as well as different software development processes and architecture approaches. Especially, I liked the lightweight approach with Kong which, again, is interesting for prototyping. Kong can be used easily as the whole gateway is encapsulated within a docker container. It can be run everywhere and can be easily migrated.

“Smart asset management and predictive maintenance with IIoT“ by Robert van Molken

Add descriptionNo alt text provided for this image This was an inspiring talk! Robert introduced an Azure based IoT architecture within an industry 4.0 scenario. The talk was really helpful as it validated approaches we took within our own projects. Using Azure IoT submodules for local integration and forwarding data for processing within the cloud leads to a flexible and maintainable architecture concept – thanks for that.

I really enjoyed the conference - looking forward to the next years DigitalXChange.