Once a year Rohde & Schwarz invites developers from all over the world to the IDC - the International Developers Conference, which is the biggest internal development event at Rohde & Schwarz (R&S). This year was undoubtedly one of the best events ever. From April 15 to April 18, more than 1,400 Rohde & Schwarz developers from every development location – from Hillsboro to Kigali and Singapore to Leipzig – followed the invitation to join the event in the headquarters in Munich and over 2000 people joined the exciting program online.
The motto “Innovation is our attitude” was perfectly chosen and the program emphasized future technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), 6G, large language models (LLMs), quantum technology, and machine learning (ML). Apart from exchanging knowledge and experiences related to these technologies, the event aimed to unite individuals from the company's global R&D network to share ideas, create concepts, and ultimately drive innovation. Aside from knowledge sharing, the event also offered various socializing opportunities, such as a Bavarian breakfast and a big party in the evening.
"The technical lectures were diverse, educational and fascinating. It was also a valuable opportunity to establish new contacts."
- Steffen Bauch -
Our colleague Steffen Bauch, who works in Leipzig as a research expert in Quality Assurance represented ipoque at the IDC in Munich. He describes his work as follows: “My work day has many facets but what I find particularly interesting is how we can make our products more efficient in the future. My team and I therefore develop systems to measure product performance and other automations. “Make things faster” perfectly summarizes and describes my daily work.”
Steffen shares his impressions of one of the biggest internal events of Rohde & Schwarz: “The conference fully met my expectations. The technical lectures were diverse, educational and fascinating. It was also a valuable opportunity to establish new contacts. I’ve had many interesting conversations and met new people. My overall impression was very positive. The event was huge, the exhibition area alone had more than 30 booths with all kinds of product demonstrations. The technical part of the conference was perfectly organized and the many volunteers did a great job. Moreover, I was really glad about how open and welcoming the colleagues from Munich and all other subsidiaries were. It’s somewhat harder to get this kind of intense and direct exchange with online conferences.”
As part of this year's IDC, Rohde & Schwarz hosted the first Clean Coding Contest (CCC). Before competing in the live contest, the best programmers were selected in a qualifying round before the conference.
Of more than 100 initial entrants from all development locations, just ten made it to the finals. Among the contestants were eight participants from ipoque of which two reached the final round. Our colleague Paul Hans Glaß was very successful and won third place.
And what did you have to do Paul?
“We were tasked with developing a program that identifies patterns in log files in a random format and gathers them in a summary file. Of course, there were several requirements to observe.”
Would you do it again?
“I found the coding contest to be an excellent opportunity to test my skills and develop more freely. Of course, I was very glad that my solution did so well and I was very happy to receive the trophy. For future contests, I would appreciate even more flexibility in the tasks. I sincerely hope there will be another competition next year. If there is, I will definitely participate again.“
