As we head into 2019, we reflect back on one of our favorite events of the year: the 2018 Synergy DevPartner Conference in New Orleans.

Packed with sessions on topics ranging from modern and agile development practices to RESTful web services to QA and learning culture, not to mention an engaging and illuminating keynote presentation from Microsoft’s Donovan Brown, the conference offered a plethora of info, ideas, tips, tricks, and plans for the future. Case studies and customer demos provided insight into practical implementations of technical concepts, and we were jazzed to introduce our new open source RESTful web services project, Harmony Core. Bourbon Street wasn’t too bad either! The legendary food, music, and culture of one of America’s most historic cities provided a great backdrop to a fun and productive week.

Here are some key takeaways from the conference:

• Improve your productivity and practices by adopting more efficient development methodologies.
• Enhance years of Synergy data and code with new technologies, including enabling connectivity through RESTful web services.
• Security and disaster recovery are important for compliance—stay up to date with Synergy SSL and operating system security patches.
• Use traditional Synergy in Visual Studio (it’s not as hard as it seems!) to significantly boost productivity, lower the barrier to continuous code integration, and improve your processes and software quality.
• Move to the cloud. Developing and running your Synergy application in the cloud is relatively easy and provides a convenient path to expand your infrastructure to meet demands.
• Education in the workplace is important—create an onboarding program that includes presentations, videos, and discussion.

The Synergex team came back to the office energized and ready to implement big plans for Synergy in the new year. We look forward to seeing you at the 2020 conference!

Donovan Brown from Microsoft got us excited about development methodologies.

Ace Olszowka from Computers Unlimited showed us what continuous integration is all about.

Carl Wysocki from WorkWise convinced us that getting to the cloud is not impossible.

Jeff Greene debuted Harmony Core, our new open source framework project.

Steve Ives conducted several technical sessions aimed at continuous integration, .NET demystification, and building RESTful web services.

Check out the rest of the fun!