BaselOne 2022 conference took place on October 19, 2022 in the Markthalle. As we were quite a few people from Karakun attending, be it as participants, speakers or organizer, we would like to share our impressions in this blog post. Some hard facts first:

Some figures about BaselOne22

BaselOne is a yearly event organized by the eponymous association existing of Karakun AG, Bluesky IT-Solutions AG and Baloise Insurance.

In total, BaselOne 22 offered 26 talks by 29 speakers and 4 workshops to 160 paying attendees. All in all, almost 400 hours of organization time were spent to make it happen.

The conference

As said, there were 26 talks, and it was challenging to choose which one to attend. The lineup was packed with well-known speakers like Ixchel Ruiz, Falk Sippach, Sandra Parsick, Otavio Santana, Katrin Rabow, Gerd Aschemann, Chris Engelbert and many more. The talks were nicely distributed across variety of topics and domains of IT. It is worth to mention that most of the talks had an introductory flavour to it to attract more beginners, but also to light a spark among more experienced folks.

And of course, there were also talks by Karakun: “Runtime metrics 101” (Markus Schlichting / Stephan Classen) and “Ich bin 3-CPO - wie kann ich Dir helfen?” (Iryna Dohndorf / Christopher Keibel).

Runtime Metrics 101

As modern applications are no longer monoliths on a server but consist of distributed microservices in the cloud, monitoring becomes more and more important. Logging alone won’t be enough if you want to be informed about free disk space, a critical number of user sessions or increasing memory consumption. This is where runtime metrics can help.

During their session, Markus and Stephan showed the audience how to implement, visualize and analyze metrics for Java applications. They did not only focus on products and ready-made solutions like Grafana or Prometheus. Furthermore, they also presented different APIs like Java Flight Recorder and Micrometer that can be used to extend a Java application with metrics and continuous monitoring.

The slides are available here. The talk is also available at Karakun YouTube Channel or via this direct link.

If you need some tipps about how to use metrics in your applications, Markus or Stephan are happy to help.

“Ich bin C-3PO, wie kann ich Dir helfen?” - Wie Maschinen natürliche Sprache verarbeiten

This talk by Iryna and Christopher was all about Natural Language Processing (NLP). We all use NLP in our daily lifes e.g. when using Siri, Alexa and search engines. But there are far more things to come in the future.

NLP uses linguistics and machine learning to get a general language comprehension which will be quite similar to human cognitive abilities. In this session, Iryna and Christopher presented the tools and techniques of NLP and discussed the roles of machine learning and artificial neural networks for optimization of NLP.

The slides are available at the BaselOne website. The talk is also available at Karakun YouTube Channel or via this direct link.

Any questions about NLP, Machine Learning, Neural Networks or AI in general? Iryna and Christopher are happy to answer all your questions!

Off the pitch

Navigating through the Markthalle can be really tricky as it has many small and bigger rooms which are not side by side. As a really handy improvement, a little map to the venue was given to each attendee to make it easier to find the right room for the next talk:

One of the very nice features of BaselOne is its size. It is big enough to attract international speakers and still small enough to easily be able to have a chat with them. And it is not just the audience which enjoys these direct interaction, also the speakers can be seen chatting and listening intensely.

At lunch time, BaselOne attendees have a really hard choice: The Markthalle offers tons of delicions tasty meals from the street-food like stands. And the best thing is: when picking up its name badge, you get vouchers for coffee and freely selectible lunch food.

But even besides the main meal, there was always something yummy around. Like the previous years Ursula from JUG Switzerland spoiled the participants with homemade Duke shaped cookies.

And as every event needs some money to organize all that there were of course a few sponsors showcasing themselves. Here for example Guy is explaining the advantages of their “Build Scan” offering at the Gradle booth.

One goal of being at a conference is talking to people and exhanging knowledge. And for this, every Swiss event offers something called “Apéro”. BaselOne of course offered one, too. It was really cool talking to many other participants and enjoying fingerfood and local beer.

Outlook

The planning for BaselOne 23 has already started. The event is planned for Oct 18/19, 2023. Save the date!

Conclusion

All of us (independant of being attendee, speaker or organizer) really enjoyed this years edition of BaselOne and look forward to next year! We totally recommend it and strongly suggest to mark the date for next year in your calendar.

Even if you´re not located nearby, Basel as a city is worth a visit on top of the conference!

And if you like to give a talk, watch out for the social media channels for the call for papers (usually it starts in January / beginning of February), your proposal is very much welcome!