This year the Ximedes TechDay took place on March 1st, bringing everyone from Ximedes together to share our enthusiasm and passion for technology. This was the first in-person event since COVID-19 that put the Ximedes people together to share insights and discuss the latest trends and developments in the industry.
The day was filled with engaging technical talks, demos, and insightful workshops. Starting off with an introduction talk by our CEO, Joris Portegies Zwart, who highlighted the value the company places on quality and customer service - always aiming to create the best based on customer wishes. To achieve this, the company believes in autonomy, which consequently means allowing the experts to lead. This approach helped Ximedes achieve its goals during its partnerships with companies like ING, Rabobank, Translink, GVB and more.
The first presentation of the day was about AI in Software Development. AI is a topic that is strongly discussed when it comes to innovation and technology. Especially in the last couple of years, it gained attention all over the world and in every industry. From the point of view of Ximedes, a company that mostly consists of developers and engineers, the question lies in the usefulness of AI - How much of the hype around AI is actually true, and can AI actually help us with our work? This topic was presented by Mats Fillerup, who worked for Ximedes for over sixteen years and is currently writing a book about the use of AI for software development.
This presentation was followed by a presentation about the use of ElasticSearch at Rabobank, held by Sjoerd, a Software Architect who currently works on Rabobank’s SmartPay platform. He showed how ElasticSearch was dealing with storing over a billion transaction records a year, and how the team at Rabobank configured it to maintain lightning fast query speeds on this huge dataset.
After these two informative presentations it was time for lightning talks. Four employees of Ximedes; Rick, Jochem, Aleksandra, and Jeroen, represented their project and gave insights into what they have been working on. This enabled the rest of the company to be updated about what has been important or what was achieved in the last couple of months. After an insightful morning it was time to go for a “Kroketten Lunch”, something that has been part of every TechDay over the last twenty years.
The afternoon started with a CI/CD battle. This session was presented by Aleksandra, Otto, and Hugo. They demonstrated their different approaches to CI/CD. Each of them presents the tool they use for working with CI/CD. This included discussing the tools Azure DevOps, Gitlab and TeamCity tools and a comparison of which tool works the best. This presentation was followed by Erik, Martijn, and Jesse who did the same on the topic of different approaches to microservice architectures - topics like service size, intra-service communication and deployment strategies were compared and discussed, highlighting the diversity of our work and client environments.
The final session of the day consisted of two parallel workshops - Unlocking Collective Wisdom and a workshop - AI in Software Development. Our employees had the option to join one of the two workshops.
To finish off the day there was a Pub Quiz where the company enjoyed drinks and bites. Ximedes TechDay was a successful day of sharing insightful information, interesting discussions and to engage with colleagues. We thank everyone that helped to make this event happen and of course every employee that is part of the Ximedes family. We are looking forward to the next TechDay!
