This was the second time I’ve been elected as a speaker for this event, so I was very excited and eagerly waiting for it to start as I already had good memories with people I’ve met at the last year’s one in Dublin. Being a speaker at a professional development conference is both energizing and at the same time, an exhausting experience. Running from session to session, enjoying meeting new people with the same occupational interests, staying focused to do well in my session. And the best things of all, hearing the public applauses at the end of my session .… I’ve felt all of these moments and it was amazing.

This year the conference was hosted in Barcelona, the heart of Catalunya and home for some of the most famous buildings that Antonio Gaudi designed. The “Hesperia Tower Hotel” had everything necessary to host an event of such a scale, especially being accommodated on the 29th floor, the view over the City was magnificent. EMEA PUG Challenge is sponsored by Progress and its partners and is aimed primarily at the Progress developer community.

Luckily for me most of the sessions were technical, me being an engineer myself. The emphasis was on established technologies like OpenEdge and ABL, but there were also plenty of sessions about Docker Containers, NativeScript, DB Administration and also methodologies and best practices to migrate your apps into using different protocols and paradigms. One of the most notable sessions I visited was “Docker Containers and OpenEdge – Getting Started” by Thomas Hansen from Nodeable company. It was a workshop for newbies using Docker Containers, a standard unit of software that packages up code and all its dependencies, so the application would run quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another. The next notable session was “Scope: Blocks, Buffers, Transactions and Locks” held by Tom Bascom. In this session, the subjects mentioned in the title were explained in detail and Mr. Bascom’s presentation was full of self-describing examples of best practices on how to use different code constructions.

My session was about a custom built tool, named CrossWay, with the main purpose of gathering the files’ cross-reference information starting with a certain file within the 4GL code of an OpenEdge application and producing a graphical output, easy to be read and understood, both from a technical and a functional perspective. EMEA PUG Challenge is not all about workshops and sessions, it has its own fun part also.

This year a DJ animated Halloween party was prepared for the attendees, with some make-up artists to keep you in the theme of the party and a football table for entertainment. However, what was more pleasant for me than the costumes and masks was the fact that I had the opportunity to meet and talk about technology with people that have a large experience in developing business applications.

It was very exciting to meet so many positive and dedicated people in such an amazing city.