Over the last few days I’ve been attending Engage. As ever, it was an excellent conference, with a great attendance from across Europe. (If you’ve not attended a user group recently and will not this year, put it on your list for next year, May 2018.) As ever, Theo is a brilliant organiser and the social events were great. As ever, the speakers were top quality.
The conference got off to a great start when Barry Rosen told me on Sunday evening that a free non-production entitlement for Domino server license would be announced during the OGS. I’ve already blogged about that, so I won’t comment further. Straight after lunch on Monday I had my first session with Phil Riand on GraphQL, a slightly modified version of my session from IBM Connect. GraphQL is still very new, but it’s a key technology, with its inclusion in Watson Workspace, the news at IBM Connect that it would be part of Connections Pink (and Maureen Leland demoed GraphQL in Pink on Tuesday), and Phil’s work to add a schema-less GraphQL to Darwino and Domino. What Phil has done to add it to Domino is (as ever for him) brilliant, and it’s great that it’s part of the Darwino OSGi plugin for Domino. You can peruse the slides below.
There were a significant number of sessions relating to Watson, both by IBMers and non-IBMers, so it’s a good time to start looking at it.
Tuesday had a variety of sessions for me, from Domino app dev to React to Connections Pink and all things OpenNTF. It was also great to see that Brian Gleeson had picked up the Watson Work Services Java SDK OSGi plugin release (only pushed up at the end of last week) and showed a demo of it running from XPages. There was a lot of learning for me and key topics that I want to extend my skills on. And the OpenNTF-related round tables in the afternoon were very well attended and very informative. There are a number of tasks I have come away from those with, and hopefully there will be more about them over the coming weeks. It was also great to meet some new people from the community and gain some great feedback. There will be plenty of opportunity to get involved over the coming months.
Yesterday was then the Watson Workspace add-on session. This was very useful to give some more explanation on how to implement some aspects like webhooks and Watson Conversation that I had not previously tried and were definitely on my to-do list. It was also great to hear of some tools to make that easier as a developer.
All-in-all it was a very hectic, very enjoyable, very productive conference that leaves me excited for the future and engaged to deliver some great things.
