Creating a more welcoming community for developers through eMerge
eMerge started as a grass root conference. Initiated by Desmond Corbett and Clint Pitlubny in the form of a meeting for frontend developers at Allianz. The goal was to get 40 interested developers to come to the Global Digital Factory spaces, have some project and initiative presentations, socialize and begin building a community. About 100 developers attended the first conference already and the organizers were surprised by the high level of developer interest and such event success.
A second conference was set up in the following year at the Global Digital Factory. This year, the number of people who wanted to participate were much more. However, because of the restriction of space, the admission was limited to 120 people.
The feedback in both the years strongly indicated that the participants wanted this event to continue to help in setting up a developer community at Allianz.
Covid struck the following year and after much thought, the event was shifted to being purely virtual. This had a clear advantage that eMerge could now have speakers and visitors from all across the globe and there was also no limitation to the allowed participants. This virtual shift and lack of participation restriction allowed for the ‘’Great eMerge’’ with about 500 participants and many great speakers. The event has historically on been organized at the GDF and Gyoergy from Direct has been an enormous help during the last years especially in setting up the conference.
This year the eMerge will again be purely virtual and then hopefully move back to an on-site or a hybrid form where people can again interact in person.
What does a day at eMerge look like?
The conference always starts with opening talks and some keynotes. The conference is then split into three streams focusing on DX (Developer Experience), FX (Frontend Experience) and BX (Backend Experience). The evenings are spent over beers during the on-site conferences and during the virtual conferences, some of the sessions stretch late at night because of the locations of the speakers, and their availabilities.
A supportive community ahead
Jochen and the eMerge organizers plan to use the platform to build a welcoming and supportive developer community. They also hope for eMerge as a platform to create problem solving networks and a support systems for developers.
Jochen Supper is the head of the Engineering team at the GDF. He mainly works on tools and libraries that help frontend developers at Allianz in implementing web apps more efficiently.
An example of such a tool is the UI library Angular NDBX, which is also open sourced under the name of Aquila.