Off to the moon
It´s all about collaboration!
The Tech Summit embraces collaboration@MediaMarktSaturn — in our dev chapter itself, with our business partners and with all other chapters to accelerate each other.
Learning from our mistakes and success stories, we strive to improve in technology, methodology, and the way we work and communicate.
Technology will shape MediaMarktSaturn now and in the future.
The focus of the event was a conference about lessons learned, programming languages and upcoming tools & technologies. Additionally, a product fair gave visitors an opportunity to experience several innovative products which will lead us at MediaMarktSaturn to our goal of becoming a leading retail tech company.
Thanks to our host and lead of development, Thomas Maurer, the 1st TechSummit took place in the Technikum in Munich, where 150 colleagues from IT and business partners came together.
Some impressions of the event…
Can Scala increase developer productivity? This question was asked by Christopher Janietz. His presentation started with a little Scala history and continued with making the case of several differences between Scala and Java. He concluded his presentation with a short introduction to reactive programming and the framework Akka, which helped multiple companies for scaling without limitations.
In his talk Microservices under business control, Florian Heubeck presented challenges of coordinating transactions in distributed environments and showed how applying various architectural principles may help. He pointed out how the Camunda Workflow Engine can serve as a tool for representing business processes and integrating them into software products.
After talking about code and tools, Accenture provided deep insights about success factors of agile transformations at other customers and learnings gained from working with them.
To get a clear mind again, Dr. Jens Wegmann performed a talk on the HDPLR method. Little known by the audience: in fact, he was a comedian. By the way, HDPLR is an abbreviation for Hauptsache die Plattform läuft rund (The main thing is that the platform runs smoothly) ;)
Prometheus — A next generation monitoring system with a powerful query language and federation was presented by Richard Steinbrück. He showed how a complete change of the approach on monitoring can make legacy tools such as Nagios or Zabbix obsolete. Guided by the do one thing and do it well principle and the concepts of blackbox and whitebox monitoring Richard showed how Prometheus can be put into practice.
Progressive web apps allow users to access your site even when the internet connection is currently interrupted. Our guest speaker Martin Schierle from Google presented ways of improving the MediaMarkt online shop among recent advancements in web standards including service workers, payment and identity APIs, as well as push notifications. Based on these technologies he showcased an enhanced customer journey.
Karel Dörner shared his personal experiences as an entrepreneur in a digital world. The essence of his speech was technology changes culture!
Following this, Emanuel Kechter shared his experience of lean prototyping and how a nerdy team decided to try a novel approach: without the overhead for a new product or project, they employed lean methods to formulate and validate a hypothesis regarding a new app for the colleagues working in our stores. The objective was to create prototypes with an app and various mobile devices towards an MVP to solve pain points of MediaMarkt warehouse employees. Emanuel showed how end user involvement, technologies like React.js, Cordova and the fail fast method enabled the team to get quick results.
As a closing game, Beat the Boss was an enjoyable quiz between techies and bosses. 25 captivating questions were raised by anchorman Christian Glosser and answered in the game, ranging from How old in days is the internet? to What do beer.com, sex.com and vodka.com have in common?. The game entertained the audience and created an exciting atmosphere in the halls of Technikum.
Regarding the results: we agreed to keep it confidential for now ;-)
Thanks for attending to all participants. The orga team is looking forward to the next event!
