Article by Germanas Samrickis, Vilnus – PDUG member , lucky winner of IDUG voucher at PDUG conference (voucher provided by IBM)
It’s a late Saturday evening in windy Vilnius and I am about to board to board a plane to Malta. I get very exited about two things. First, this is my first time at IDUG conference and second – I will have a chance to spend a week in sunny Malta for the first time By the time I have arrive to my hotel it was already past midnight and I was very surprise how busy and noisy district were conference will be held, nevertheless, few beers and a pizza slice will help me fall a sleep soon.
Sunday is an intense day – Workshops. Workshops day. Don’t know how many people were registered for Sunday workshops, but there weren’t that many people when I have checked in to the conference. I went to Building RESTfull services workshops. All participants got a chance to create RESTfull services on IBM lab system. I was very interesting to see how many things you can do with API. This is something that developers at my company would love to have. Workshop wasn’t long, only 1,5ish hours and I had a chance to attend few others workshops. Workshop for v12 got everyone attention and it had highest attendance Gareth Jones and his fellow colleague Anthony Ciabattoni gave a very detail overview of the things that you should to consider when migrating to Db2 v12. Excellent presentation and excellent hand out that definitely could be used as migration checklist with Bonus content – examples of building DB2 APIs. If for instance someone wasn’t into v12 or APIs there was an excellent workshop for data science with a hands-on exercise for building machine learning algorithms. Main days of Event. No doubt main hot potato of the whole conference was Db2 v12.
Thru Monday till Thursday numerous presentations touched this topic in various aspects, such as – migration planning, new features, things to expect, common issues. I guess highest attendance were during Db2 A team commander John “Hannibal” Smith a.k.a. Campbell presentation on Db2 V12 “War stories”. And if you are after modernizing you Mainframe applications IDUG is right place to go as it also offers tracks that suited for application developers or technical experts that seeks introduce new technological capabilities to their infrastructure such as Analytics on Z.
Networking/Social networking. All well-organized conferences have one thing in common, they not only want to share information with the audience but keen on building connections. For doing so IDUG offered even two! evening events, one was driven by IBM and another by CA.
I would like also cheer a success of PDUG, which probably every year wins an award This time for largest regional user group in Europe! This year PDUG have expanded it’s boarders and have members in Lithuania so maybe in near future it will be held in Wilno )
Final thoughts. I got surprised by the number of attendees at this year IDUG, it was 400ish people. Comparing to other conferences that I have attended such as GSE UK and GSE Nordic IDUG is twice bigger. And it this case it’s fair to say – the bigger the better . Sharing ideas and experience – two main things that drives innovation forward, so I guess there is no better place to get all your questions answered or hear experiences and challenges faced at other companies, like in IDUG.
