I was at winter-jax 2018 in Munich last week. This was my first time I attended this big developer conference.

As you can see in the headline picture, two big players in open source area with cap by hat and  IBM, RedHat booths and with Viada  😉

One major topic this week was the potential deal, IBM is planning to buy RedHat for 34 billion US dollars. This potential deal played a big part in Sebastian Meyen´s opening speech on the first day of the winter jax conference in Munich.

He highlighted the history and  Red Hat´s contribution to open source.

If you want to listen his speech in German, you can watch the sessionon youtube here  . His speech is before the keynote “Trust and confidence through chaos” from Russ Miles

By the way, I like Russ Miles´s approach to “chaos engineering” .

My very high-level free interpretation of “chaos engineering” is:

• “Break the system, before it breaks your business!”

From my point of view “chaos engineering” is more or less comparable with testing. So, I defined more detailed, free interpretations:

• “Don’t be afraid and learn from testing/failure”
• “Bad news … yes, testers want to break your system, but the good news is: they will do it, before you run it in production 😉 “

Open source contribution

A very good match to the open source topic was the keynote from Christopher Ferris.

He asked the good question: Who pays for open source?  You can watch his session on youtube here

Christopher Ferris reminded us in his speech that IBM is a major player and contributer in open source, with a high involvement in Apache , Eclipse and Linux  during the creation and in development. These three projects are fundamental pillars for the open source business.

There are many other open source projects IBM contributes to, which you can find here  on the  IBM Developer site.

Christopher Ferris during his keynote.

Open Source in AI

Also, Niklas Heidloff gave a session “Development of AI Applications without Machine Learning Skills”. In this session, Niklas also highlighted the topic open source with the Model Asset eXchange . The Model Asset eXchange contains free, deployable, and trainable code.

It is also very important to understand that these models on Model Asset eXchange are reusable for production, because they have licenses developers can verify.

Image of the session from Niklas Heidloff. Here you can see some impressions from Niklas.

Open Source in Java

Steve Poole highlighted in his session “What’s new for Java in clouds?” that IBM open sourced OpenJ9 (Low memory footprint). Steve also reminded us in his session, that the Java community should be more active and should define the needs for cloud, machine learning and upcoming technologies like Quantum.

By the way Fernando Cejas did a session about Quantum Computing, you can check a sample here  “Quantum computing in action: IBM’s Q experience and the quantum shell game”.

Moments

If you want to see our favourite moments of this conference, just visit the twitter moments from Miriam Oglesby.

Let’s see what’s next?

Greetings,

Thomas

PS: By the way, you can use the IBM Cloud for free, if you simply create an IBM Lite account. Here you only need an e-mail address.