Share your highlights: 10 Years of the Developer Community!

Hey there, happy anniversary!!

1️⃣ When you joined the Developer Community and how you first discovered it.

I joined in 2017, and it was by accident.
Looking for help to work around a problem caused by "academic ignorance".
    Some linguistic university experts for German language up in sky, far from reality, decided:
    "S_sharp"  ß (a lowercase only character for hundreds of years)
    will be also an uppercase character from now on.
No one cared about the impact to sort orders, code conversions, pattern match. regular expressions, ...
My cry for help:
German collation of ß in upper and lower case
In DC I got help and advice within a few hours on how to escape
until a new release or bug fix might have an official solution.

Exploring DC was another big surprise for me.
It was rather similar to a proposal I had done in 2005
and  I was massively pushed back by service managers at that time.

DC covered and extended my basic intentions
I fell in love immediately and still feel like a proud grandfather
observing his successful growing grandchildren.

2️⃣ A meaningful moment or story from your personal journey here.

It was somewhat longer than a moment, though just a single trigger.
The challenge was to start working with Docker in some OEX package
Before that, I was rather resistant to publishing complex examples.
The effort to describe a complex setup and not having control
over implementation was rather significant.
With Docker I had a reproducible environment and no traces or remaining
junk after termination.

Another extra was learning to produce videos of my examples for contests.
I never did it before and still don't have any private videos on Youtube.

3️⃣ An article, question, or discussion you consider especially valuable

There are two recent articles that moved me most:
The Wait Is Over: Welcome GoLang Support for InterSystems IRIS + followers
and
Reducing the Footprint of the Docker image of IRIS Community Edition

It's 2 times the same authoring engineer, and what he presents matches my
personal understanding of what quality software system engineering is like:
- precise and detailed analysis
- detailed and fully through tested code before release
- 2 top-class projects

My personal sorrow:
There are groups that may force out the results just because of the
"NOT INVENTED HERE" mentality in some areas.
I speak based on personal experience after being attacked following
a backport of %JSON classes to Caché some years ago.

I joined in February 2016 - I still remember @Evgeny Shvarov sent me a text and asked if I wanted to join the new "official" InterSystems community. And it went on since then. With some pauses, of course 😉Yet, it was always a gratifying experience to be part of the Community and I've learnt a lot!

1️⃣ When you joined the Developer Community and how you first discovered it.

I joined the InterSystems Developer Community about four years ago, around the time we were implementing TrakCare at our hospital. I was actively searching for practical answers, real examples, and best practices beyond official documentation. During that search, I came across the Developer Community, where the Learning resources, documentation, and especially the certification section turned out to be extremely helpful. What started as a place to look up solutions gradually became a space I returned to regularly, not just to read, but to understand how others think, design, and solve real-world healthcare problems using InterSystems technologies.

2️⃣ A meaningful moment or story from your personal journey here.

One of the most meaningful moments for me was realizing that I had moved from being just a reader to an active contributor. Participating in programming contests, writing articles, and completing InterSystems certifications marked an important turning point in my journey. It was not just about achievements, but about the recognition from peers and InterSystems experts that my work added value. That experience gave me confidence and motivated me to take on more challenging projects, especially around FHIR, Embedded Python, and Generative AI.

3️⃣ An article, question, or discussion you consider especially valuable — one you believe others should take the time to revisit.

There are many valuable posts in the Community, but I would especially encourage revisiting articles and discussions around Embedded Python in InterSystems IRIS.  These discussions changed the way I approach solution design by demonstrating how IRIS can combine data management, interoperability, and AI-driven logic in a single platform. They pushed me to experiment with using Embedded Python for validation, transformation, and AI-related tasks within real integration scenarios, leading to more flexible and maintainable solutions.

The Community has been a steady part of my professional journey, and it is great to see how much it has grown over the years.