Summer Intern Update: Cerner DevCon

Connor Larson 

Applied Mathematics, College of Business, Policy, & Analytics

Cerner - Innovation Campus - Software Intern

My name is Connor Larson and I am a software intern at Cerner. This week I got to experience Devcon. Devcon is an in-house convention put on by Cerner. It is a two-day convention where all developers and engineers that work at Cerner come together for talks about various things. There were 82 different sessions and over 180 speakers. The talks ranged from topics about life like “how to ask stupid questions” to tech talks about the newest technology. All of the speakers who gave the talks were Cerner employees who applied to give talks. This is very cool because it shows just how much people care about the company that they work for that they are willing to volunteer their time to research something and then tell the rest of the company about it.

As I said before the convention was split into two days. During this time, we had complete freedom to go to which ever talk we wanted to and they provided lunch and snacks and refreshments. The best part about this is that Cerner pays for everything and it is entirely free. On top of that they also bring in some outside speakers for the keynotes. The speakers they brought in this time was a google executive, an owner of a security company and a computer scientist from the UK who makes music with code. All of these speakers were phenomenal. The speaker from google speaker was about goal setting and how striving for perfection is actually counterproductive because with the lack errors leaves no room for growth. This idea is innovative because most managers strive for 100 percent perfection so the push back that comes is natural. The Speaker for security spoke a lot about how security is necessary but being in the healthcare world, doctors value patients’ lives before security. This was interesting because context is so important. The last keynote was extremely interesting because he developed a coding language that produces music. He created this to get kids excited about coding and used the software to teach ten-year-old how to code. After his speech they had a social event and he performed which was really cool to see.

The whole event was amazing to me as I had never been before. Cerner is a great company to work for and interning for them has been a great experience so far. I can definitely see myself working for them in the future.