Today (Thursday) is the final day of the Innovate 2012 conference. The last day is always kind of strange. Some people are focused on attending the final sessions, and getting every last drop of knowledge and value out of the conference. Others are sitting in the lobby, killing time until they go to the airport to catch their flight home. Some people just look tired. There is a definite change in the energy level.
I didn’t have any scheduled talks for today, so most of my day was spent following up on some conversations started earlier in the conference. I was also able to attend a couple of sessions that I was not directly involved in. The session on Cool Extensions Using the Rational SDK was excellent. It should have been. The presenters were Geoff Clemm and Ralph Schoon, the two highest reputation guys out in the Jazz.net forums. Ralph is a member of our Jumpstart team, and he is extremely knowledgeable about the Jazz platform. Both of these guys don’t just sit at a desk and talk about theory, they are constantly interacting with our customers and helping people do things more effectively. The session was very good, and loaded with content. The tip on using Plug-In Spy and YARI was a good one.
I also attended a session by one of our other Jumpstart team members, it was on the Enterprise Extensions for zOS, and it was given by Robin Yehle. During the session, I found that there were a lot of people who were unaware of some of the core capabilities of the enterprise extensions. The impact analysis capability is not well understood by a lot of people, and it is something that can have a lot of value for many of our customers.
I am finishing up the last day talking to a few specific people, and after that I am done.
Reflections on Innovate
Just some broad observations, information and thoughts about Innovate 2012……
- Those Jazz.net forums are now quite different. I am still getting used to using them, and using the tags, but I really like the user interface and some of the social aspects of the new forums. It is interesting because I have heard people talking about how they need to participate more in the forums for quite a while. This week I am hearing people talking about building up their reputation on the site, which is great. More participation will just make the forums much more effective and helpful.
- People seem to always ask about the Jazz Jumpstart team member blogs. The new Jazz.net site now has these aggregated, so you can see our new postings out on Planet Jazz. It’s not just Jazz Jumpstart, you will see blogs from a variety of thought leaders on subjects involving Jazz technology and many of the common issues in the software development community.
- There is a new community sprouting up on developerWorks, called the Application Lifecycle Management Community. It is open to anyone, you just need to register and get an IBM ID. It has a wiki associated with it. I love areas like this, where people can share tips, code snippets, and other information that will make ALL of us more effective. I even added a page for sharing information on Jazz Extensions after hearing that session today. Check it out, and share links to your favorite resources with the rest of the Jazz Community.
- In general, I find the conference is a great way to meet people and learn. I find that the most valuable types of interactions seem to happen in many of the small group discussions that I have during the conference. I would love to see us encourage more of these small group discussions in the future.
Quote of the Day
“Seaworld was fun, but I don’t think that was really Foreigner. Those guys were too young…”