EKON 20: summary and pictures

This week I’ve been at EKON conference in Düsseldorf (Germany). EKON is one of the most important Delphi events in Europe and this was the 20th edition! It has been a honor for me to join a list of top quality speakers (here you can find them all).

It has been a pleasure to spend a lot of time with some old friends (like Marco Cantù, Stefan Glienke and Girish Patil) and also have the opportunity to meet some new friends in person (like Arnaud Bouchez, Joachim Dürr and Jens Fudge). People attending the conference were very friendly and organization has been perfect.

I attended almost all english sessions (and also attempted to take a german one but I definitely need to learn some basic german before repeating the experiment) and they were great:

• Marco Cantù gave the keynote, a session about RAD Server technology and third one about Win10 latest support additions in Delphi with a lot of technical insights; it is always a privilege to hear latest news directly from the Product Manager and learn fine technical insights as well as having an overview of the functionalities;
• Arnaud Bouchez gave a session about software architecture (including SOA, SOLID and DDD) and a second one on a very important and common problem: how to reduce our technical debt (how to deal with legacy code and improve it); most of Delphi developers should focus more on their architectural choices and have had (or are going to have) (more or less challenging) experience in migrating legacy code to the current era, so I really think everybody should listen to Arnaud sessions 🙂
• Ray Konopka, one of the best presenter in the Delphi horizon, had a session about new Windows 10 controls in the VCL and proved to be very patient with respect to some exotic questions from the last row, at the end of the presentation 😉 Sadly his other session about Radiant shapes (FMX) was at the same time of a session of mine and I couldn’t attend;
• Jens Fudge had a session about using App Tethering in desktop and mobile applications with some real world examples. It has been quite impressive how easy is to build a communication infrastructure to share data and notifications across desktop and mobile applications. The presentation was easy to follow as it was structured with a progressive improvement approach;
• Girish Patil gave a session about the new document viewer technology from Gnostice, a very nice addition for every business-oriented FMX application since it enables apps to show and edit documents (PDF, docs and spreadsheet) on mobile platforms. As usual Girish gave a comprehensive overview of the library with a lot of examples;
• Sebastian Gingter had a session about TypeScript. I am pretty sure it was much more interesting than I was able to appreciate because of the language (my fault, I don’t speak german) but it was however interesting to see the demos he showed during the session;

On Tuesday, there has been the speaker panel with questions from the audience and a brief history of the conference (directed by Jeroen Pluimers) to celebrate the 20th anniversary.

Speaker panel (EKON20)

From my point of view, I am very happy that my two sessions had a good audience and a positive feedback from people who attended. I come back home with a couple of ideas to evolve both TFrameStand and MARS-Curiosity library. Some of these ideas came out while speaking with Arnaud and Stefan about using TFrameStand to mock (thus enabling prototypation and test) some UI parts and I also got a question about porting TFrameStand to VCL. I think (and hope!) there will be some news about it in the upcoming months and I have to thank them all 😉

During these three days I took some pictures (as I love doing), here are a few:

Keynote (Marco Cantù)

MARS-Curiosity session (me)

TFrameStand session (me)

Win10 VCL controls (Ray Konopka)

App Tethering (Jens Fudge)

TypeScript (Sebastian Gingter)

Gnostice for FMX (Girish Patil)

Unit testing (Stefan Glienke)

You can see the full album on Google Photos, including some took during a (cold) walk after dinner with Arnaud and Girish.

EKON 20 T-Shirt

I want to explicitly compliment with the organizers for the conference T-shirt (the best ever, in my opinion) and for the perfect management of the conference. Hope to see you all next year at EKON 21!

Andrea