GSE UK 2023


In November, I spent time at the GSE UK conference in Whittlebury Hall, near Silverstone in the UK. It was my second conference, so I was full of anticipation and unsure what I was going into. My first thought was – how on earth am I going to navigate the mammoth agenda with an exceptional amount of content, and the second – are there going to be people I know?

I spent time before the conference going through the agenda and selecting one or two sessions for each slot to make sure that I had a few things lined up to go to. On the Monday, they had put on a half-day set of sessions that were particularly interesting, I went to a session on Cyber Resiliency specifically looking at how customers can use a Cyber Vault to be particularly resilient against potential cyber-attacks. The vendor area with stands wasn’t open until the following day, so I wanted to make sure that I had acclimatised. Many friends from the previous conference (IBM TechXchange) were there, including Steven, Emma, Joe, Tony, Shari. When I saw them socialising in the bar, it really helped me find my feet in terms of understanding how to navigate the conference and using the new app they had started using.

 

As I had settled, the next three days were far more entertaining. I spent time wandering around the stand with a Lego Mainframe, the Plexi (which is a see-through Mainframe), the formula one race car that sat out the front, the InterSkill stand, and really just absorbing the atmosphere that came with GSE UK. I went to some sessions around an introduction to CICS – this was highlighting the next features in the latest release 6.1, this also signposted the rest of the sessions at the conference which Tony highlighted particularly well. Michelle did a fantastic session about Macro 4’s use of Galasa and it was brilliant to see her advertise the way that they had taken many of their old tests and converted them to Galasa tests. Additionally, Broadcom did a great pitch about DevOps on the Mainframe, and how to modernise from the perspective of making changes to systems. One session was around OpenTelemetry too, it was brilliant to see the way that open-source and parity of technology across the distributed and on premise platforms were merging and they were becoming far more synonymous with each other. There’s a lot of work to be done in this area, but it’s growing in excitement due to the amount of information that is flowing between disparate systems struggling to talk to each other.


 

A particularly proud moment was seeing Jade Carino give her talk on Galasa (How to Test the Mainframe Without Knowing the Mainframe). It was the first time that she’d given the talk to an audience, and it was brilliant to see her move around the room, give her demos smoothly and even if something went wrong, she was able to pick herself back up and figure out how to move on. She had a room full of interested users and hopefully we have one or two that went home to see if they could try it. It was a brilliant moment to see her present and I’m really proud of how far she’s come.

 

Thank you to GSE for a brilliant event, and I’m excited to be part of the virtual event in April 2024.

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