10 Years of codecentric in Bosnia
codecentric AG was founded in 2005 by Rainer Vehns and Mirko Novakovic in Solingen. It now has 11 locations in Germany and five more in Bosnia, Serbia, and the Netherlands. Rapid growth for a mid-sized company in just a few years. The second location was founded in 2008. And it may come as a surprise at first, but the founders did not initially choose to expand within Germany: the second location of codecentric AG is in Doboj, Bosnia, and celebrated its tenth anniversary this year.
10 years of Software Crafting were celebrated in Doboj with craft beer.
We looked back on ten years of codecentric Bosnia with Managing Director Rainer Vehns and Site Manager Mladen Vasic – how it all began, how the location has developed – and gave an outlook on where the journey will lead.
The office in Banja Luka also celebrated an anniversary in 2019: last spring, exactly five years ago, it opened its doors.
5 years of codecentric Banja Luka
New Office and Coding Serbia in Novi Sad
It was an eventful year for our Serbian location in Novi Sad. In March, we moved from rented office space into our own company building with plenty of room for growth and development. We can finally organize meetups and workshops in-house. The photos of the office and the opening party speak for themselves.
Shortly after – from May 15 to 17 – the "Coding Serbia" conference in Novi Sad made its comeback after a three-year hiatus. Hundreds of IT professionals, 32 talks, two workshops, and three conference days in one city – it was a spectacular return. Topics ranged from Agile Development and UX/UI to Machine Learning, Distributed Systems, Data Science, and Software Craftsmanship, all the way to Blockchain, Cloud, Mobile, and much more. The speakers were equally diverse. Some of them are well-known luminaries in the IT industry and world-class software developers. Others are outstanding but not yet widely known developers, some of whom are just at the beginning of their speaking careers. And of course there was plenty of opportunity for networking. For us, it was an all-around successful event and a worthy comeback. We are already looking forward to the next events with our Serbian colleagues.
Dave Snowden's keynote at Coding Serbia 2019
New Office in Stuttgart
A meetup, two talks, 100 guests, excellent catering, and freshly mixed cocktails – the team at the codecentric Stuttgart branch really went all out for the move into the new office in November.
codecentric in Munich moves to the Plaza
Good things come to those who wait: nearly a year after signing the lease, our Munich location recently moved into the new, more beautiful, better Plaza in the Werksviertel. Also joining us are our partners from UX&I and Syncier GmbH. We wish everyone a wonderful time settling in and getting set up.
The new codecentric Plaza in Munich
codecentric conference
It has now become a tradition for us to gather once a year with all our employees at the codecentric conference, our internal unconference. In June, we met for the third time in Soltau to exchange ideas without a fixed agenda. Around half of the sessions focused on technologies; but climate change and the question of what defines our culture in times of constant growth also kept our 180 attending colleagues busy. Next year in June, the codecentric conference will enter its fourth round, which outsiders are welcome to follow along with using the hashtag #cconf.
codecentric conference 2019
Berg-Pitch
In 2019, our headquarters hosted the Berg-Pitch three times. Back in June, Berg-Pitch 6 was literally a hot affair. In tropical outdoor temperatures, around 200 people made their way to codecentric's air-conditioned auditorium to follow the renowned startup competition. Moderated by codecentric colleague Jan Hölter, six founding teams presented themselves within six minutes, five of them within the competition, from which adiutaByte, snabble, and yeswedo emerged as winners. In the "Local Pitch", Solingen handball champion Max Ramota presented his charitable project "MAX CAMP Handball" to the audience, which offers handball camps for school children during the holidays.
On September 25, the Berg-Pitch "BuKo Edition" took place for the first time as part of the Federal Conference for Young Entrepreneurs (BuKo). The main prize of €10,000 went to the 17- and 18-year-old guys from "Sharezone" from the Düsseldorf area, who designed a digital school planner for students.
On November 25, the seventh Berg-Pitch round followed, with four out of five participants coming from the region. The winners were founders Veronika Bauer and Elina Giorgou of the plastic-free cosmetics label "Verpackmeinnicht", who took home not only the Berg-Pitch win but also a wildcard for the Rheinland-Pitch in Cologne.
Javaland 2019
This year too, codecentric was present with a booth at the community conference Javaland. Between roller coaster rides and cotton candy, attendees could visit our talks on design languages and integration testing, or dive into the Java Innovation Lab, among other things. To close out the event, participants at the workshop "Microservices, but done right this time!" developed a distributed web application consisting of independent microservices, alternating between technical presentations and hands-on tasks.
Industrial IoT
In the area of (Industrial) Internet of Things/IoT, previously more of a niche topic at codecentric, 2019 kicked off with a bang: our first Softwerker Special of the year, dedicated entirely to this topic, was published at the beginning of January. The issue comprises 100 pages of content on technologies for connecting machines and devices, and also includes contributions from guest authors from our (personal) network.
This Softwerker issue was essentially the script for our first Meet-the-Experts event of the year: the Industrial IoT Day. For an entire day, the issue's authors and other experts presented talks on IIoT-relevant technologies.
The Apache PLC4X project was also a topic. Initiated in early 2018 by codecentric employee Christofer Dutz, the open-source project was already named the 200th Top-Level Project at the Apache Software Foundation in April 2019 – a great achievement after a relatively short development period. This also attracted the interest of numerous companies in PLC4X, such as our partner Confluent, whose employee Kai Wähner blogged about the integration with Apache Kafka.
The Apache PLC4X mascot "Toddy"
PLC4X will also be featured in several talks at building IoT 2020. Our showcase this year at building IoT was our Mixed Reality innovation project "Welding Assistant", which won the "Best Showcase Award" at the FIR RWTH Aachen ERP Days shortly after the conference, in June 2019.
Finally, at the end of 2019 we entered into a new partnership in the field of Industrial IoT, with the Landshut-based software company HiveMQ. Its CTO Dominik Obermaier had already been a guest author in the Softwerker Industrial IoT Special and a speaker at the Industrial IoT Day. Not only because we have had long-standing ties with the company (e.g. through the tool MQTT.fx by our employee Jens Deters) and Confluent, among others, is a shared partner, we are hoping for many synergies.
Finally, at the end of November we joined the Industry Business Network 4.0 and have since been contributing to the IndustryFusion platform. More so than other associations of its kind, IBN 4.0 relies on open-source technologies, which is very much in line with our values.
Digital Week Dortmund
IoT was also the topic of a workshop that our Dortmund location hosted at the Digital Week Dortmund, or DiWoDo for short, at the beginning of November. With a total of four events, codecentric Dortmund participated in the themed week. In addition to fine dust measurement using IoT technologies, the program included a startup story, a talk on the influence of video games on the business world of tomorrow, and another talk on New Work. All events were excellently attended and the response was outstanding. We look forward to the next DiWoDo!
IT Security Without Unicorns
In October, we headed to it-sa, Europe's largest IT security trade fair for cloud, mobile, and cyber security. Together with our partner sicdata, we presented talks and a first version of our AI-powered tool for automatic contract recognition at our booth. IT security is serious business! – Anyone who claims otherwise is probably trying to sell you a unicorn. At codecentric AG, you will find a competent partner who can address your individual needs and won't tell you fairy tales about fairy dust and snake oil. The portfolio of our InfoSec team can be found here.
Chaos Engineering
Great strides were also made in the area of Chaos Engineering. The second Meet-the-Experts event was dedicated to the topic, this time a Meet the Experts "on tour": over five days, Benjamin Wilms, inventor of the Chaos Monkey for Spring Boot, ChaosIQ's Russ Miles, and Dennis Schulte held five presentation events in five different cities. Physically a tour de force for the three speakers, especially since temperatures had reached tropical levels by the end of June, the event series certainly succeeded in getting more people excited about Chaos Engineering. At the end of August, another Chaos Engineering roadshow took place with DB Systel.
The Chaos Engineering community within codecentric has also grown. There will be a surprise at the beginning of 2020 – stay tuned!
API Management with Kong
In November, codecentric AG officially sealed its partnership with Kong. Kong is one of the most popular open-source-based API gateways for multi-cloud and hybrid environments, optimized for microservices and distributed architectures. As a "Silver Go-to-Market Partner", codecentric AG now uses its expertise to help companies accelerate the transition to microservices and APIs using Kong. codecentric expects the partnership to yield valuable synergies. For example, there are already plans to monitor Kong as an API gateway even more effectively in the future. Kong's focus on cloud-native technologies and microservices meets the needs of many customers who want to expand their IT landscape in the course of digitalization while keeping it manageable.
DevOps & Dine with Instana
Speaking of partnerships: this year we co-hosted the "DevOps & Dine" event in Solingen together with our partner Instana. In a meetup-style format, five speakers presented talks on DevOps best practices and application performance management – including Wiliam Louth, Complexity Scientist at Instana, Daniel Kocot, Senior Solution Architect at codecentric, and Sebastian Ickler, Senior System Architect at B. Braun Melsungen. Impressions from the event are available in this video.
The successful format will be repeated next year – at our newly moved-into codecentric Plaza in Munich. January 14, 2020 – save the date!
EventStorming
In August, October, and November, we had the inventor of EventStorming, Alberto Brandolini, in person as a guest at our locations in Solingen, Hamburg, and Munich. We learned his methods around Domain-driven Design first-hand. A wonderful experience for our colleagues and the external participants alike. Further Meet-the-Experts events will follow in 2020.
And what else?
Which other technologies have moved us this year is documented, as usual, in our popular Blog, which again had over 2 million views in 2019, as well as our free magazine Der Softwerker. Three issues have already been published this year, and the next one is in the works. Our monthly Newsletter also offers the opportunity to stay up to date effortlessly and get inspired by the ideas, innovations, and initiatives of our colleagues.
Stay with us – happy holidays and a great start to the leap year 2020!