Inspiring learnings: Engineer’s Week highlights

27 June 2023
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5 min

By Oscar van der Leij

The Rabobank communities' mission is to share knowledge and passion. This reflects the Engineer’s Week of which the fifth edition took place last spring. In three days, Rabobank hosted an online conference, where we aspire to share knowledge, inspire and motivate, refine and expand your skills, expand your network and boost the engineering culture. Featuring presentations from experts across seven different skill lanes. From inspiring keynotes to technical deep dives, there was something for everyone at this conference. In this blog post, we’ll share a selection of must-know highlights and key takeaways.

Insights and inspiration from thought leaders

The conference kicked off with a warm welcome and an emphasis on the importance of having this opportunity to share knowledge, inspire each other, and how that can influence the way you work. The keynotes provided valuable learnings on boosting productivity with tools and optimized workflows, and the importance of having design as an integral part of everything driving business results. But also, learnings on knowing yourself and others being the most important ingredient for growth, and the complexities and opportunities on how our IT ecosystem actions impact the environment and society. That’s plenty of food for inspiration.

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together

African proverb

Managing microservices and practical use cases

Microservices are a popular software architecture pattern that involves breaking down a complex application into smaller, independent services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. One of the learnings from the presentations covering microservices is that the contradiction between the independence benefit and binding to a framework works out well for structuring and governing microservices. Learnings from other presentations covered use cases building serverless web applications in AWS and simplifying deployment and management of your microservices application landscape in Azure services like Container Apps. We see a broad range of tools and services that support the microservices strategy which sometimes feels overwhelming. Therefore, it’s great to learn from the practical implementations by the different Rabobank squads and teams.

Engineers week take aways

The Web3 and AI revolution

Web3, artificial intelligence, and the metaverse are converging to create a revolution in the way we interact with the digital world. In the different presentations we learned how Web3 represents the evolution of the internet, moving from centralized systems to decentralized networks enabled by blockchain technology. With the release of AI bots like ChatGPT we see another evolution of artificial intelligence rapidly advancing with the ability to create predictive models and personalized experiences. We also see the metaverse as the next step in the evolution of virtual reality, creating fully immersive digital worlds. It’s great to gain insights on understanding the risks and the opportunities this revolution brings for Rabobank.

The importance of developing soft skills

As one of the presenters at the online conference, I know the importance of giving great talks and presentations. It requires preparation, organization, and effective communication skills. One of the presentations gave useful learnings on how to achieve these skills in your talks and presentations. Learnings from other presentations showed us the importance of developing yourself and improving your skills by educating yourself with online courses. Continuously investing in your professional development is key to staying up to date with the latest technologies and development resulting in improvement of your daily work. One of the organization lane talks covered one of my favorites and in my opinion most important topic: having happy and empowered engineers and making the life of Rabo engineers easier.

Impact on my future way of working

At the beginning of this blog, I referred to how these conferences can influence the way you work. For the presenters this relates to the question: what do I want to achieve with my presentation and what message do I want to bring to my audience? For me, these conferences are a great opportunity to step out of my focus area, broaden my vision, and gain insights and learnings on other soft and hard skill areas. The answer to the question is about how will this influence my work? I would like to spend more time on getting to know myself and others to grow our team. As for hard skills, I’m going to explore how the Web3 and AI evolution can benefit our organization.

How will the Engineer’s Week influence your work?

About the author

Oscar van der Leij

Solutions Architect at Rabo Carbon Bank

As a solutions architect at Rabo Carbon Bank, Oscar designs and guides implementation of technical solutions to support sustainable farming practices. He works closely with farmers to develop climate-smart solutions that reduce emissions and remove carbon from the atmosphere. His ambition and passion is to deliver impactful technical solutions and therefore support sustainable farming. Oscars vision is to help farmers transition to sustainable practices that protect the environment while improving their livelihoods.