This was my second time speaking at IBM TechXchange. First time was at the inaugural event in 2023 located in Las Vegas with around 2000 attendees. At this year’s event in Orlando, it had grown to around 9000 attendees. New this year was that the Java community track was organised by JCON. We had a room at prime location near the registration area.
I started off the conference with a welcome dinner/social event for the IBM North Region Territory Team at TopGolf where we enjoyed food and testing our golf swing before continuing to the opening of the Sandbox (exhibition area).
Tuesday started with the opening keynote where, among other things, Bob was introduced. I was so lucky to get a private preview license for Bob the week before the conference. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much time to test him/it/her? (I will refer to Bob as he from now on…) since I was busy with last week’s conference. I did, however, try to use Bob on Tuesday afternoon for creating a demo for my Wednesday morning talk. He did solve the task I gave him, but he didn’t do it the way he wanted. Rather than using a sort of bleeding edge library, he chose to do it the manual way. The AI tools of today are great for doing mundane tasks with technologies that have been around for a while, such as migrating from one version of to another. But they are not necessarily good for creating demos with newer technologies and libraries. So, long story short, I ended up creating the demo myself.
I did the talk, The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java together with Emily Jiang from IBM. Since it was at an IBM event with a co-speaker from IBM, we tuned the talk slightly to include some references to IBM over the last 30 years. Some good old anecdotes about early WebSphere versions and we shared some experiences with tooling such as WebShpere Studio Application Developer (WSAD) and Rational Application Developer (RAD).
There were also time for a couple of afternoon runs in the area even if the humidity were a bit over what I am used to. As expected, the culinary experience of such a big event isn’t something to write home about. But the lunches on the two first days of the conference were very good. A hot buffet of decent quality. That is something you can’t really say about the boxed lunch the last day. I get why conferences do this, but here’s a tip: If you want attendees to stay for the closing session, at least feed them with something decent.
