What a conference!

eMerge 2019: Retrospective

Find out what happened at  this year's Allianz developer conference

On 3rd and 4th December 2019 it was time for our Allianz developer community to bust through the doors of Werk 3 and fill the GDF with words such as “Azure”, “Apigee”, “DevOps” and “XSE Tabloid”. That can only mean that the eMerge 2.0. was happening.

eMerge is the Allianz developer conference hosted by the Global Digital Factory, first introduced to the developer community in 2018.

This year, eMerge has brought together 110 developers from 24 different Allianz locations and OEs to share their expertise with other colleagues within Allianz. The conference is about knowledge sharing but equally about networking with people from all across Allianz. The Allianz developer conference covers topics from DevOps, Integration over to Development to address the most prevalent topics with which developers within Allianz are confronted with.

 

Each of the two days was kicked off by a keynote speech.

Day 1 included the Welcome Key Note by Christoph Mascher, COO of Allianz, in which he highlighted that our developers are crucial for Allianz as they translate insurance into technology making it possible for Allianz to thrive the digitalization of the company. However, this is only possible if IT develops a domain knowledge about business and business develops domain knowledge about IT.

We were super excited about our second day keynote speaker: Abel Wang, Principle Cloud Advocate and DevOps Lead at Microsoft. He has been writing code already for over 20 years and shared his impressive knowledge with the Allianz developer community by sharing Microsoft’s DevOps journey. Microsoft went through a very painful transformation with loss of work force and suffered partition.

“If it hurts do it more often. Find what hurts and keep doing it a bit better." -Abel Wang-

Besides the keynotes and presenations, eMerge offered a variety of different sessions, covering different areas of development:

Ask the Expert:

'Ask the Experts' is a chance for the developers to ask questions directly the experts who developed the services the developers are using in Allianz.

In “Ask the Experts” the developers can reach out directly to the person who stands behind the given service and have direct feedback.

This year’s 'Ask the Expert' sessions were comprising topics around enterprise architecture, ADP & cloud and our NDBX UI library. Our developers received insights into how the Enterprise Architecture is connected to the daily work of a developer and where able to ask the NDBX team about the creating, consuming and sharing user interface components.

Hands On Sessions:

Another new edition to the conference where our hands-on sessions, where developers had the opportunity to get their hands dirty by applying the just received information.

In the session “Web applications from the perspective of a penetration tester” participants were able to try to hack a small sample web application on their own after receiving a detailed insight into penetration testing.

Another insightful session called “Server less Hands-On with Functions as a Service on Azure” expanded the developer’s knowledge by giving an overview about server less cloud development paradigms and functions as a Service in particular. In the end, our Allianz developers were able to develop their first functions in Azure.

We are happy about the positive feedback of this year’s eMerge Conference and looking forward to the next conferences to come!