2019 was really busy. We continued working for existing customers on new projects. And we did a smaller project with Verbraucherzentrale NRW. We became partners of the University of Szeged so that we can provide thesis projects and interships for students. Students were a new story and very welcome. In total we had 6 students this year. Some of them continue working with us after their internship which is very good.

I reduced my outbound activities but one big event is the Java Forum Stuttgart which I can not miss. I didn't want to talk about any new buzzwords but wanted to give a presentation that is really missing. In the daily work I do a lot of coaching and teach people how to program. In this context I referred to Kent Beck's Implementation Patterns book a lot. Usually I send people to Youtube to watch a presentation about a new topic. But for Implementation Pattern there is none. Then I made one, for both giving a talk at JFS and for my own good.

My presentation was very well received. I made it into the top 10 of the talks based on participants voting. I was a bit surprised when I saw that my talk was put into the 500+ people Hegel-Saal auditorium. Just do it ;-) Well, in that same place I talked about Was passt besser zu Big Data, Java oder Python? in 2016.

On side projects we worked on chatbots an we will do more with these next year. My second subject when studiying at the University of Tübingen was computational linguistics. It's like coming back to an old interest of mine. We'll do more work with DialogFlow, Alexa, Siri, Rasa, Botkit and involve some students in this.

Nandor, who is a PhD in bioinformatics, started a meetup that we host in our office. We are looking forward to expand this area next year as well.

Our team in Stuttgart was joined by Levente who previously worked in our Szeged office.

We hired more developers in 2019 and our company chat room has now 15 people. The good news for our customers is that we will have some free capacity from January 2020 on.