ICC 2021 Recap

This week we took part in the Ignition Community Conference (ICC). The theme this year (2021) was Evolve.

In its second year of being virtual, it definitely evolved from the previous year—instead of Discord, the conference used Attendify and Wonder.Me for virtual hangouts. This helped the conference have about 80% of the interaction of an normal in-person conference.

Using Wonder.Me, conference attendees had impromptu hangout sessions with video, building small circles of conversation or joining larger ones. You could also move an avatar to different sections of the screen where there were named areas. For example during the “Meet the Exhibitor” meetup, there were boxes for each vendor with their reps “hanging out” in their area, and you could move your avatar there if you wanted to chat. Each avatar had a little dot moving around to follow your mouse to indicate where you were “looking”. This brought all the awkwardness you’d expect from people mixing with one another in person—but without all the background noise of the conference. Definitely a win.

ICC 2021 Break-Out Sessions

The sessions were solid. As usual, the keynote kicked off the conference by welcoming new folks into the Ignition community while bringing everyone together and invigorating the seasoned veterans.

Up next, I watched the Covid Vaccine presentation which had some great insights on how to solve such a large scale manufacturing effort. Then I sat in on the Inkscape for Perspective session, learning some valuable insights for using SVGs in Perspective. As is the case with running a company, I attended the virtual meetup, then took the afternoon sessions off for some meetings.

I came back for the end of day meetup, and had some great conversations. Then unlike an in-person ICC, I had a quiet evening and got a great night of rest.

Day Two started with the developer panel and some good insights on where Ignition is headed—along with the usual rounds of “What about script debuggers? When do we get Push Notifications? When is Version Control going to get better? How long until Vision is dead?” And everyone’s favorite “When do we get a tool that can pinch to zoom into a screen and show different graphics based on the zoom level?”

After more meetings, there was a twitch virtual meetup, then Corso’s very own Brian McClain on the integrator panel with some interesting discussions on being an Ignition Integrator in 2021.

The day ended with a very exciting Build-a-thon which had some great projects, including my GeoFence resource winning 2nd place in the Ignition Exchange Challenge!

The ICC 2021 Take-Aways

Ignition is here to stay, and is a very mature product

Ignition 8.1 will likely be the main version for another year. While there weren’t any foundational changes (like in 2019 with Perspective), Inductive Automation has a solid road map for incremental features and will be making more sweeping changes in 8.2. This means Ignition 8.1 is in a good place from an overall market perspective, as Inductive Automation doesn’t need to build the next big thing to get more adoption. There was some more discussion around 8.2 making Ignition being easier to vertically integrate—presumably with things like more robust API support, interfaces, and potentially the ability to make the gateway itself a program instead of a service.

There was also a lot of talk about improvements on the Docker implementation, which makes a lot of sense after Inductive Automation brought Kevin Collins on board to further those efforts.

People are creating really awesome things with Ignition

We’re super impressed with some of the things we saw at ICC 2021. The autonomous boat discovery gallery project was wild! Super impressive to see Ignition being used in that context. The video/chat integration resource used in the Build-a-Thon was also really neat, and we’re excited to break that down and see how they did it.

Virtual conferences can be great, they can also be exhausting in a different way than live conferences

As we all know from the pandemic, doing all day virtual meetings can be a slog. This was the only downside to the event in my opinion, assuming we couldn’t have the conference in person. That said, it was easier to take a break at the end of the day, decompress, and get a good night of sleep. I can count on both hands how many hours of sleep I usually average during ICC with all of the after-event gatherings, seeing old friends, and meeting new people. It’s a great time, but an interesting comparison to a virtual conference.

The Ignition Exchange and Community

My main take away from the conference given the marketing push for the Build-a-Thon and the Ignition Exchange Challenge, is that community is very important to Inductive Automation. Corso Systems agrees, hence why we have released many projects on the Exchange, continue to participate in the Cross Industry Collective, and have done Ignition Community Live events, and beyond.

It feels like the Ignition Exchange is a big deal for the folks like Travis Cox and Kevin McClusky, who are more focused on interacting with the integrators and end-users. In comparison, the Developer Panel made it feel like the Ignition Exchange doesn’t exist. A lot of questions in the Developer Panel chat were asking for tools that already exist in the Exchange, or could be built by someone and added to the Exchange. Some folks linked to Exchange resources in the chat, and I posted a Town Hall note to remind people it existed. It was wonderful during the post Build-a-Thon when Carl Gould showed up in our circle. We had a great discussion about how his side of the business wasn’t as involved with the Exchange since they are more internally focused, but that he was excited to check out the Ignition Exchange. He had even learned a few things about Python when reading through the chat. I think the Ignition Exchange has great potential, it just needs to find an identity and marketing perspective from Inductive Automation.

The push for the Build-a-Thon also felt a little at odds with the “Community” nature of the rest of the marketing. I completely understand giving the top integrators from the last two years a stage. Pushing them makes total sense from a marketing perspective, still it would have been awesome to open it up to the community a bit more. Maybe have a community Build-a-Thon with some pre-determined Exchange resources that teams could use to build an app that gets voted on during the conference. Or, a challenge for larger teams during the Build-a-Thon itself, or any number of other options. This is a larger logistical problem than is worth the energy to figure out for the conference. I still think there could be a huge opportunity to make the Build-a-thon (the most watched part of the conference) more focused on the community at large rather than two people on stage.

Our industry has a diversity problem

Watching the Build-A-Thon and most of the conference, it is clear our industry population as a whole is mostly middle-aged white men. Regardless of technical roles vs. non technical roles, there are simply a massive majority of white men compared to women and people of color.

The most telling comment on our internal ICC-2021 Slack channel during the Build-a-Thon was “I’m waiting for a woman other than the person who does the announcements to show up in one of these videos.”

Talking to a few other integrators before the conference (after commenting on some LinkedIn posts about the Build-a-Thon using some DC Comics graphics from the Justice League with the competitors heads photoshopped on with only two men represented when there are characters who are women and people of color), the main comment I heard was “there just aren’t many women or people of color applying to our jobs.” This is simply a sign that we need to do more when finding qualified candidates. These candidates are probably not where these companies are typically looking. We need to also make the companies more attractive to candidates so they feel comfortable applying in the first place.

It isn’t always easy to find people from different backgrounds than yourself to hire. It takes self-awareness, growth, and effort to build relationships with different groups of people and communities. Luckily, system integration is a very easy industry for people to get into even if they don’t have a “typical” technical background. I was even talking with a woman on a tech support call earlier in the week about how she was so excited to talk to different people and find out how they got into the industry. She said it was common to find people who had no background in programming or computers at all who were doing really well in this line of work. This mirrors my experience exactly.

While we’re not there yet, beginning to have conversations and bring awareness to this side of our industry is the only way to start initiating change. The longer it takes to make change the harder it is.

In keeping with the theme of ICC 2021, between now and ICC 2022 it is time for the demographics of our industry to see a drastic improvement like we are pushing for with the Corso Systems team.

Updated - 7/5/2022