This year I made the breakthrough and got accepted on to Fujitsu’s Distinguished Engineer scheme as an Associate. I’ve got some more development to undertake to remove the associate label. But the seeds have been sown and I know how to grow, just like the conference name badge!
The two day conference theme hosted in Berlin, was “Shape the Future of Society” and was focussed around UN Sustainability Goal 11.
On the first day, I had the opportunity to learn from peers and colleagues on the aspects of technology and solutions which drives them. Over the course of 2 hours, I attended two sessions which were incredibly interesting and linked. First session was from one of our global delivery colleagues giving an introduction to DevOps. This was not a coding session, but more a summary of his experiences with working in an DevOps environment.
I then attended a session on deploying Infrastructure as code from one of my colleagues within the Security Business. This built nicely on the previous session as it give a good overview of the different build deploy frameworks such as Ansible/Terraform/Azure Resource Manager.
Following some much needed coffee, I joined a session hosted by Veritas on how we can get better insights on data to make better decisions. This was an interesting session, but really only scratched the surface of data management and could have been a full day!
The final scheduled session of the day for me, was a session on Cyber Threat Intelligence and was delivered by some of our very impressive Threat Intel analysts. Some of the content was explained in line with high profile examples of the BA breach.
We spent the evening networking and playing big screen games – yes, we’re all geeks at heart !
Day 2 of the conference was where the collective brain power of the community got to really flex its muscles. Our theme this year was around sustainability and how we might use our technical brain power to create innovative solutions to some specific sustainability problems. There were a number of teams who were aligned to 3 major cities, Tokyo, Bangalore and of course our host city of Berlin. Each city then had teams focussing on specific area of Housing, Transport or the Environment. We also had the opportunity to hear from Dr. Leonardo Gheller Alves, Neil Bennett and Thomas Deloison
I found myself in Tokyo 8 – our focus was on transport. I’m biased but there was some incredible talent in this team. I have two comments to make on the team, one I think was probably the youngest in the group (but, I’m not that young) and two I was the only associate in the group. Our team had a number of well established DEs as well as a Fellow. Of course, none of this mattered as we worked together to define and frame the aspects of the challenge we wanted to solve. Each of us brought different personalities and skills to the group. At first I reverted to type (ISTJ) and needed to sit back and think (yes, that’s me with the glasses) about all that was going on to enable me to assess and add some value. Most of the people who met me at the conference might not agree that I am introverted! But, I am.
Once I managed to get a grounding in what we could achieve, I felt I was able to make some influential decisions and contributions by creating the name of our solution and how we could develop that over time. For me, this validated both my position in the team as well as in the community. These highly respected individuals adopted what I was contributing. It also summarised the ethos of the community – working together to build a better and sustainable future.
We then had the opportunity to pitch to our peers for some feedback before the judging. Having assembled as a mass group we then got to hear the outcomes. At first, I didn’t realise that my team made it to the final 3 as I was too busy focussing on the pattern in the numbers !
The team representing Bangalore deservedly won the final pitch which included audience votes!
In order to wind down from the intense day, we then had the awards ceremony (supported by some local food and wine) and also got to hear of future plans for the scheme. If we can keep this collective brain power together, I believe we can make a real difference to society.
Thank you to all the team behind this conference. Professional athletes make winning Olympic gold medals seem easy because they train hard behind the scenes and we only get to see the end product. The same can be said of the team behind Fujitsu’s Distinguished Engineer scheme – it was no mean feat to organise this conference.