Help! How to grow a corporate Julia community?

For many years we simply accepted the two language problem at our company and spent our time converting MATLAB/Python prototypes into C/C++/Java production code. But during the last two years we have been growing an internal Julia community from 3 initial enthusiasts to over 300 Julians. We would like to share our ongoing journey with you and inspire other Julians who want to kickstart similar communities at their company.

ASML is 30.000 employee company which is the world leader on photo-lithographic system that are crucial for semiconductor manufacture. For many years we accepted the two language problem and spent our time converting MATLAB/Python prototypes into C/C++/Java production code. But during the last two years we have been growing an internal ASML Julia community from 3 initial enthusiasts to over 300 Julians. We would like to share our ongoing journey with you and inspire other Julians who want to kickstart similar communities at their company.

Our journey included many obstacles, but we are now in a good position with Julia at ASML. Thanks to Julia’s package manager and LocalRegistry.jl, it was easy to set up an internal registry. This led to a flourishing internal Julia package ecosystem with currently over 50 registered packages used by several of ASML’s research and development departments.

To grow further, we foresee plenty of challenges. Changing the software culture from a project-driven to an inner-source approach is one such challenge. Another challenge relates to deployment of Julia into all of our existing software platforms, ranging from embedded hardware systems to cloud services.

By overcoming these challenges, we will finally solve the two language problem at ASML and bring different engineering competencies together. It shouldn’t matter if you are a domain expert, data scientist, data engineer, software engineer, software architect, machine learning engineer, business analyst or anything else. If you can code then you can learn Julia and join in on the fun.