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The Guide Share Europe (GSE) Annual Conference took place on 1st & 2nd November. It was my first time attending, that too as a speaker. GSE is a great platform that enables a large number of technical streams including all the usual mainframe technologies plus ‘zCMPA (Capacity Management & Performance Analysis,’ ‘New Technologies,’ ‘101, the stream for newcomers or recent-comers to z’ to come together all under one roof and share knowledge, experiences and ideas!
From “How to Be a Better Performance Specialist” to “Blockchain Explained” - The sessions delivered during the conference were extremely insightful and I certainly took a lot away from every session I attended. The format of the day allowed 16 different streams to be present all delivering a broad range of topics.
On my first day I was very keen to attend the majority of the ‘New Technologies’ sessions where I was able to learn more about emerging technologies that will affect us such as ‘Blockchain,’ ‘Cloud,’ ‘Robotics and Mechatronics Developments,’ to name but only a few! It was a great opportunity to network with those that are heavily involved in terms of implementing these new technologies and learning about their experiences, any obstacles they faced and how they tackled those obstacles! The Blockchain presentation in particular demonstrated the power of the Blockchain and how incumbents in various industries have started to adopt and leverage Blockchain technology. I left with the knowledge of how to explain Blockchain to others which is something a lot of articles and videos have previously failed at for me - for me speaks volumes about the presentation.
2nd November, the next day, was my presentation. As part of the ‘101 stream,’ I took part as a panellist and my session was titled: “Panel Discussion: Client success stories of finding fabulous, young new z talent,” it was an opportunity for recruiters to pose any questions they wanted at us to find out why we chose a career in mainframe computing, what excites us about working on z, our training plans as well as our future plans. The session was very well received!
Overall I think the two day conference went absolutely fantastic and was greatly complemented by vendor exposition with more than 30 stands as well as a conference dinner which proved to be a great opportunity to network with everyone who is anyone in z systems in the UK plus many from around the world.