The SpringOne Tour is, for the first time to date, coming to South Africa. The tour brings together leading software companies, developers, enterprises, and cloud experts, to give attendees the opportunity to learn, build, deploy and run transformational cloud-native software.

The announcement was made by Absa, who have partnered with cloud-native platform provider Pivotal Software to bring the tour first to Johannesburg on the 8^th to the 9^th of April, and then to Cape Town from the 11^th to the 12.

The purpose of the move is apparently two-fold. Firstly, it is aimed at giving the public and businesses insight into the key workings of the SpringOne cloud-native Java platform and content. Secondly, it is intended to help bridge a skills shortage and improve networking opportunities within the developer community.

It also appears to be a move by the bank to embrace those three words that you expect to hear and read plenty of – namely the fourth industrial revolution.

Andy Baker, chief technology officer at Absa, elaborated that the tour will allow its team to gain valuable insight into the future trends that the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) is setting in motion. “The SpringOne conference is in line with our strategy to create a major open source community that solves real problems for our customers. We have an exciting pipeline of technology initiatives within Absa, and co-sponsoring this event will enable us to bring top-class speakers directly to the developer community. Our teams are extremely excited about meeting some tech titans, and we look forward to participating in this event,” he enthused.

Attendees can expect to have face time and insights from experts in both traditional presentation and informal conversations about modern application development, DevOps, CI/CD, and cloud.

Baker added that Absa’s collaboration with Pivotal Software reflects the commitment by the bank to transforming employees’ skillsets, which, he stressed, will play a crucial role in transitioning their labour force, ultimately to the benefit of their customers and clients in Africa.

For the general man and woman on the street though, it appears the time has never been better to jump into coding and development in some capacity, with programming skills on track to become one of the most bankable abilities in the 21^st century, as those yet to be imagined careers emerge.

For more information on the conference and to register, those interested can visit SpringOne Tour website, and use the public discount code S1Tour2019_SouthAfrica_700.