Ergon at VIScon 2023

VIScon is the largest computer science conference in Switzerland. This year, it took place from 20 to 22 October at ETH Zurich. It was attended by many Ergonians who shared their experiences of their passion for IT with the students. 

Very little sleep, a web application that transcribes lectures and a lot of questions about starting a career – three very intense days, and then VIScon 2023 came to an end. Every year, it provides ETH computer science students with a platform for further quenching their thirst for knowledge. At the 2023 conference, Ergonians supervised a hackathon, gave talks, taught methods in a workshop and invited participants to take part in a Rubik’s Cube challenge. 

Hackathon: One app for all lectures

14 teams, 48 hours and one goal – developing a ready-to-use solution. The Ergonians Patrick Humbel, Consultant, and Noah Heusser, Senior Software Engineer, supervised the students during the three-day hackathon. Over those days, sleep featured very low on the students' list of priorities and their staying power was remarkable. The fact that one of their teams made it to second place was a great achievement for the two supervisors. “The group managed to develop a ready-to-use web application with a sophisticated user experience in an extremely short time. That’s impressive,” says Humbel. The application transcribes video lectures. It summarises the transcript, highlights key points and creates revision questions. 

Workshop: Architecture KATA

A KATA is a centuries-old Japanese martial arts form. The aim of a KATA is to perform an exercise over and over again in order to improve with each repetition. An architecture KATA is based on the same principle and uses brief exercises to improve people's software architecture design skills. In a workshop, Michael Gut, Senior Software Architect at Ergon, demonstrated how this works. “Software architecture is hardly covered at university. That made it all the more astonishing that it was so easy for the students to complete the architecture design task,” says Gut. The approaches used were also interesting. “Some participants knew each other better, others less well. They were in different semesters and approached the task differently. But because they worked in groups, these differences were evened out. In the end, all of the software designs were pretty much of the same high standard.” 

Ergon talks: User research and mind traps

Last year, Urban Kronenberg, Senior UX Architect at Ergon, gave a lecture on user experience. At the request of the students, he followed this up by giving a talk on user research this year. Kronenberg was impressed by the questions asked at the end. “The students are interested in how to determine what users really need. Or how to make clients understand the enormous benefits of user research. This goes beyond their field of expertise. And these are questions that are also of concern to us as experts in our everyday work,” he explains. Julien Silva is a Senior UX Designer at Ergon. In his talk, he highlighted the dangers of mind traps. Mind traps are blind spots in our reasoning that occur unconsciously and influence feelings, decisions and, ultimately, actions. “At Ergon, we have a technology sounding board for such cases. The sounding board members come from specialist groups within Ergon. The aim of the sounding board is to examine and assess projects from different angles,” explains Julien Silva.