IBM TechXchange is a big event. They didn’t disclose any numbers, but if I should guess I would say somewhere in the range of 7-8000 attendees. It was my third time speaking at the conference. First time in 2023 in Las Vegas, then last year in Orlando, and this year in Atlanta. New this year was that I got to experience it as an IBM Champion. There are some perks associated with that, such as having a dedicated room for us where we could enjoy the meals in a little quieter ambiance. There were lots of social activities with possibility to hang out with the other champions and we had a whole day of technical content on Monday before the main conference started. We also were able to get access to the Sandbox (the expo) an hour before the rest of the crowd.

TechXchange is all about IBM and IBM technologie, with the ever-present IBM Bob. Even if, on the surface, Java doesn’t seem to get much attention, it is still there strong as ever. Every code demo in the keynotes where with Java. You only hear about Bob for Java, not Bob for Rust or Go or anything else. The Java Community also got a prominent spot int he form of JCON USA as a co-located, fully integrated actually, event and with the Java Community Hub in the Sandbox. I will write a separate post about JCON USA at TechXchange and publish it shortly after this one.

My talk this year was AI Augmenting Techniques with Liberty, and I had the pleasure of presenting it together with YK. Check out the slides here. We also talked briefly about maybe turning talk into an article or tutorial of some sort. More to come about that later.