eMerge 2021

In this second year of pandemic lockdown, we were able to organize the Allianz Developers conference eMerge all over again! So what happened this year? How were the events? What is new?

eMerge 2021: how was it organized?

eMerge took place completely virtually again from 24th to 25th of November. Over 600 Allianz employees participated to hear from our incredible lineup of speakers from various industry leaders such as Google, Microsoft, Oracle, GitHub, TNG and more. 

What happened during the events?

All participants joined the keynotes streams, whereas more specific streams where offered in the Frontend Expereicne (FX), Backend Experience (BX) and Developer Experience (DX) areas. 
We had different incredible talks around varied topics such as ‘’From Design to Development’’ by Carolin Difner from Sin Hegde and Micha Block from DIXD/GDF , ‘’Java in Containers’’ by David Delabassee from Oracle, and ‘’How to start and maintain a developer’s community’’ by Samuel Lukes and Abdelhalim Hadid from Allianz France.  
A total of 332 questions were asked during the event and total likes received by the questions were 592
The top question of the event was ''In Allianz a lot of enigneers suffer from insufficient hardware/AVC. What kind of hardware are you providing to your enginners to ensure productivity?''    
eMerge session

Keynotes

Day 1

On day 1, to start us off, we had the Welcome keynote by Jordi Balcells Robert from Allianz Technology[SDJ(T1]  Business Applications team, Kristoff Molnar from Google who talked about the Developer tooling at Google and Chris Heilmann from Microsoft to lead us through the closing and debugging processes. The first day of eMerge was closed by Florian Wolters (Allianz DIXD) with his talk on Customer Interaction, and Samuel Lukes and Abdelhalim Hadid’s (Allianz France) introduction and tutorial to developers communities.

 

Day 2

Day 2 of the event started off with speakers from Spotify who talked about the Spotify’s developer portal backstage.io and Allianz direct speakers with their topic ‘’Cross-everything Teams with Full-Skill people’’. The event was closed by keynote speakers from Allianz Technology, Allianz SE [SDJ(T1] and Confluent with a focus on a global DevOps community and using data to implement Meshes.

 

Experience Streams

Frontend 

Day 1

The Frontend experience streams on the day were hosted by Tobias Siebert and Jochen Supper (GDF/DIXD). Speakers from Allianz Technology, Allianz Global Digital Factory, Google, TNG, Satellytes and DIXD led the day for the frontend experience. The stream started off with a talk around visualizing design and development within a cycle and understanding interface as an interactive piece and making it ‘speak’.

We had a very in-depth presentation around the State of Angular NDBX and State of Angular by both Allianz Technology and Google in the second half of the day. Along with that, our colleagues from Allianz technology (ABS) talked about shifting from ABS Rich Client. 

Day 2

The Day 2 focused on a huge variety of topics such as Webcomponents, automating the angular application testing, introduction to the headless CMS. The second half focused on novel topics like understanding the carbon footprint of the applications and how to improve productivity for developers using Github Actions. 

Backend

Day 1

The Backend experience streams for the days were hosted by Edgar Garmel and Krishna Singh (Allianz GDF). We had a speakers lineup from Allianz Direct, Red Hat, TNG, Oracle, Allianz Technology and Allianz Germany. We saw really engaging topics such as understanding DDD and Hexagonal architecture and creating efficient container based applications through changing the development process. We also heard more about how the shift to Cloud is influencing programming and the open source platform, Java 17.

Day 2

The second day of the Backend stream started with a talk about the potential role of AI in shaping the future of customer service and an introduction to threat modelling and Darkside. The second part of the day were about event driven architectures and introduction to CISL as a tool to ease Orchestration

Dev Ops

Day 1

The DevOps stream during the eMerge were hosted by Gyoergy Hrabovszki and Harshavardhan Nayak Chandrahasa. The speaker lineup during the event belonged to Allianz Technology, TNG, Oracle, GitHub, Allianz Direct, Micro Focus, ADP & TNG, and ABSi & TNG. We started the event off with understanding the management of large infrastructures and best ways to go about it. The theme of the day was around sharing best practices and experiences around improving the DevOps experiences from various places.

Day 2

The second day for the DevOps stream, as was the entire event itself, was focused on introducing our audience to the recent developments. The day covered varied topics such as Micro Focus’ ELIZA and understanding how DevOps has influenced Incident management in the current age. We also had topics around migrating to cloud and learnings from it and an interactive session on Global E2E monitoring by using Dynatrace.

eMerge awards. . . what?

For the first time in eMerge we also had the Best Speakers Awards!! The participants voted on each talk and out of all the votes, the speakers from the highest rated talks were given the best speaker awards. Our winners for this year were: 
From our keynote speakers:
Sam Lukes and Abdelhalim HADID with the topic "Craft Community: How to start and maintain a developer's community" from Allianz France
and
Christopher H. from Microsoft with the topic "Closing the web coding/debugging loop"
Along with our keynote speakers, the highest-rated talked from each of the streams were:
Tug Grall from GitHub
Allianz Direct DevOps from Allianz Direct
Carolina Benito Sánchez and Sergiu Petean from @Allianz Direct
Felix Hamann from Satellytes
Dheepan Raju from Allianz Technology
Dr. Cathrin Möller from TNG Technology Consulting
Chad Arimura from Oracle
Joachim Kohlhammer and Andreas S.from Allianz Technology
Benazir McGuire (Burhan)⚡and Tobias Siebert from Allianz Global Digital Factory
Minko Gechev from Google
Congratulations to all our speakers and Thank you very much for preparing such amazing sessions!!

What next?

While eMerge is over now, the speaker lineup and participation was engaging and energizing! The participants voted eMerge an average of 9 out of 10 in the overall organization and quality of presentation. While everyone seemed to miss the ‘in-person’ networking, the overall shift to virtual platform seemed to be appreciated because of improved accessibility. 
All of us here at the GDF and Allianz enjoyed the eMerge this year, but now we must wait for another year for more! Or do we? If you liked eMerge and want to know more about more events at the GDF connect to us on LinkedIn to stay updated!
Did you miss the event? No worries, we have you covered! eMerge sessions are now available to watch for all Allianz employees at the eMerge event page: eMerge 2021 - Allianz Developer Conference | Allianz Connect
See you again next year!