Op 26 juni organiseren de Dev@CGI-, TQM-, Cloud & Infra-, Architectuur-, CX*UX-, AI- en DevOps Practices een gezamenlijk practice-evenement! Een avond met interessante presentaties van zowel interne als externe sprekers, een moment om kennis te delen en collega’s te ontmoeten. We zijn enthousiast dat we zoveel Practices samen kunnen brengen – eerdere edities waren een groot succes en we hopen jullie allemaal weer te zien!

Dit keer is het hoofdthema ‘Overleven in een Agile wereld’, een onderwerp dat relevant is voor al onze Practices (vakgebied communities binnen CGI) en waarvan we hopen dat het jullie zal inspireren.

The 26th of June the Dev@CGI, TQM, Cloud & Infra, Architecture, CX*UX, AI and DevOps practices are organizing a shared practice event! An evening with interesting talks, by both external and internal speakers, a moment to share knowledge and meet your peers. We are excited to be able to bring many of the practices together, previous events have been big successes, we hope to see you all again! This time our main topic is ‘Surviving in an Agile World’, a topic relevant to all our practices, we hope that is something which will inspire you.

Keynotes

Five High-impact Agile Engineering Practices
Eoin Woods

Agility means that we need to embrace the fact that doing most of our design work before we implement anything does not work very well, and perhaps never did. Agile working has proved that delivering software early and often helps to reduce risk, lower cost and deliver value earlier than previous approaches.  This means that architecture work needs to evolve from a set of "up-front" blueprints into something much more fluid and evolving, based around styles and patterns, principles and decisions.  While easy to say, this change of focus means that we need to rethink how architects spend their time and how they work with their development, UX, testing and other colleagues. 

In this talk Eoin Woods will explain 5 key practices that he has found to be the most valuable way to spend a lot of his time as an architect in this more fluid, evolving and continuous architectural world.  The practices are Technical Leadership, Quality Attribute Requirements, Architectural Decisions, Managing Technical Debt and Feedback Loops.  For each one we will identify why it is valuable and what we need to do to make it effective.

Eoin is an experienced software engineer and architect, formerly CTO and Chief Engineer at Endava. He is an Academic Visitor, teaching at Imperial College London on a part-time basis. On top on that Eoin is a regular conference speaker, has co-authored or contributed to four books on software architecture and received the 2018 Linda Northrup Award for Software Architecture, from the Software Engineering Institute at CMU.

Eoin Woods - Speaker

Surviving Agile, by Embracing the Right Practices
Derk-Jan de Grood

Nowadays, the world is changing rapidly. This not only influences our sense of security, but also forces us to reconsider how we work — and it profoundly impacts the organizations we work for. In the context of agile adoption and ongoing digital transformation, we may feel challenged in our roles as professionals. 

So how do we stay relevant? What do we need to do to stand out and continue to contribute in a meaningful way? 

Whether you're part of an organization just beginning its agile journey, you're navigating the complexities of a third-wave agile transformation, or your organization is moving away from Scrum, Safe, or whatever agile methodology. One key question remains: What does it take to truly stand tall? 

Derk-Jan de Grood will explore the power of practices — and how embracing the right ones can unlock new levels of proficiency, elevate your skills, and ensure stronger alignment with your organization’s evolving needs. 

Derk-Jan is principal consultant and inspirator at Innspire. He is a sought after keynote speaker at conferences around the globe with a true passion for sharing his experiences and insights. Read one of his bestselling books, visit his blog, listen to his podcast, or come hear him speak at this years CGI congress. .

Derk-Jan de Grood - Speaker

Program

Breakout sessions 

17.00 - 18.00 Walk in & dinner
18.00 - 19.00 Welcome & keynote
19.10 - 19.40 Breakouts - choice between 4
19.45 - 20.15 Breakouts - choice between 4
20.15 - 21.00 Keynote
21.00 - 22.00 Drinks

Cross-Tenant Architecture: Central Monitoring - Sem Nijssen

At CGI, we develop a wide range of innovative solutions for our customers, each presenting its own set of challenges and security considerations. Maintaining these solutions can be complex, especially as they are hosted across various servers and sometimes even span from on-premise to multiple cloud environments.

To address this, we developed a central monitoring architecture for Envalior—and potentially other customers in the future. This architecture is a cross-tenant ETL pipeline designed to securely collect data from multiple on-premise sources into a single, centralized location (Azure) for monitoring purpose. 

The architecture has been set up in a modular way so that every client can use parts of the solution, or the complete solution. The modular components are: Data pipeline, Platform, ETL, Dashboarding and ML (AI).

A visual guide to understanding semantic embeddings & feature space - Jonathan Maas
In this seminar, Jonathan Maas covers the topics of LLM semantic embedding spaces, RAG, and tSNE-visualizations within semantic space, drawing additional examples from his Master thesis on visual cell analysis, to exhibit potential use cases for anomaly and error detection, clustering and cluster analysis in vector embedding space, and the insights such analyses may reveal about models.
Efficiency Is Key: How (Not) To Query Databases - Yoshi van den Akker

You are building a web application and use a database. You test everything thoroughly on your laptop, and it works perfectly. Even processing large amounts of data is no problem at all! After this great result, you deploy the application on the client's server for the first time. Suddenly, pages take multiple seconds to load, and as soon as you click any button, your browser tells you "This tab is not responding".  How could this happen?!

The answer might just be that your application uses the database inefficiently. To prevent this from happening to your next project, Yoshi will discuss some frequently made mistakes with database queries. He will show you how to identify potentially problematic queries and fix them. All this can be done without any database experience, they are not as scary as you may think ;)

How to create a Low-Performance Team - Mats Donselaar
We’ve all seen presentations about High-Performance Teams. The ideal balance of collaboration, diversity, leadership, and innovation that creates a team capable of meeting any deadline and weathering any storm. But what are the pitfalls? Can we, in our attempts to live up to such ideals, unknowingly take actions that have the opposite effect? 

In this presentation, Mats takes a close look at the software development process. While most people have only the best intentions and want to create the best possible solutions, there are ways we can unintentionally cause stress, frustration, and missed deadlines.

The goal of this presentation is provide a satirical and cautionary tale of the pitfalls in software development. Mats explains how to maximize the misery in your project, cultivate cynicism, and to guarantee deadlines will be missed. But more importantly, how to avoid those pitfalls.

Introduction into Software Architecture Patterns - Rene de Vries
Most developers have heard of Design Patterns, they typically fit well together and create maintainable solutions for repeating problems. Software Architecture patterns are not that well known (except maybe for the most misinterpreted Micro-Services). This talk will introduce you to some of the most use full Software Architecture patterns. We'll go over a patterns like micro-services, strangler fig, CQRS and many more and provide a view pointers on how you can start using them tomorrow. This presentation’s intended audience are software engineers or starting software architects.
Why code sucks – not your fault, (but it is) your responsibility - Roel Jonkman
There are many things that influence code quality. In this presentation, I’ll list the most important one in an agile context, talk about the results and give ways to counteract these forces of evil™.
Platform Engineering: Scaling DevOps for the Modern Enterprise - Stephen Ombre
This presentation introduces platform teams and platform engineering as essential strategies to scale DevOps and agile practices across organizations. It explains how platform engineering addresses common DevOps challenges by providing standardized, automated, and self-service internal platforms that empower developers and accelerate innovation. The talk covers key concepts, benefits, real-world examples, and how platform engineering supports adoption of cloud-native and AI technologies. Finally, it offers practical guidance on getting started, emphasizing a product mindset, user engagement, and continuous improvement to drive successful platform adoption and transform software delivery at scale.
The need for agility in space - Jacob Mulder
“Survival of the fittest” is a form of agility. In an IT project we adapt, we try to be agile, and we learned that from Life. Life on Earth adapted for billions of years. And now humanity is slowly looking around in Earth’s environment. In orbit, on the Moon, we have plans to visit Mars, our robots have visited Venus, moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and some even have left our Solar System. In doing so, we learnt that Outer Space is a harsh environment. The radiation and the lack of gravity have serious impacts, and we need all our agility to cope with such challenges. Some people actively confront those challenges. Years ago, more than a million people started a new country, Asgardia, the Space Nation. Their goal: prepare humankind for living and working in space. I studied Astronomy and IT and I’m quite active in Asgardia. I’ll present a few reasons for that. One of them will become obvious when you first see me. And then you’ll also understand why agility is very important to me, personally.

Registration form