My take on WeAreDevelopers, Vienna 2018

I just came back from Vienna, the home of WeAreDevelopers World Congress. This was my first time there, and I enjoyed it big time. Even if it is only the 4th edition this thing is growing faster than Moore’s law — like doubling not in two years but rather in one… this year there were around eight thousand people, and at many times I had a feeling of walking (or running) through Frankfurt Airport in between flights.

Speakers

I quickly decided to attend the conference when I saw the speaker lineup — that was like seeing all the world-known DJ’s at Tomorrowland or Untold music festivals. I was happy to listen to Steve Wozniak (Apple co-founder), Joel Spolsky (Stack Overflow CEO), Andreas Antonopoulos (Open Blockchain expert), Renaud Visage (Eventbrite co-founder), Ilya Grigorik (Google), Eileen Uchitelle (GitHub), Tereza Iofciu (myTaxi), Mars Julian (Netflix), Stephen Fluin (Google) and many others (full speaker list here).

A nice thing was that the audience could write questions that would come up on screen at the end of a session, using Slido. Each question could be upvoted, so the Q&A usually had the most relevant questions on top. There were also some funny jokes, like for example when a guy called “Bill Gates” asked Grigorik (Google) how IE could be stopped … and Grigorik said laughingly he would also kill it with fire, adding afterwards that Edge is really fast.

Subjects and takeaways

The presentations covered pretty much everything: artificial intelligence (from neural networks to ethics and accountability), innovation, gaming (Doom inside info from John Romero), microservices, security, augmented reality, writing code efficiently. And as people say, there cannot be an IT conference nowadays without blockchain … so there was blockchain of course.

Here are my articles covering the main points of each of the 3 days:
Day 1 article: from the Woz to the future of the web
Day 2 article: from AI to being an efficient developer
Day 3 article: from open blockchain to imagined Cardiac Overflow

General feel

The general feel of the whole event was nice and geeky, with a few problems due to the size of the event. There were many booths that were cool and creative. For example there were always queues at Microsoft and BMW’s biggest booth areas, placed at the entrance of the event — either to watch real time BI reports about people at the conference in order to get a free t-shirt (great success with that for MS) or to put augmented reality glasses on and assemble something in a BMW engine (people queuing for that as well). There were many others there like IDE developers, banks, blockchain companies, etc — and they all had games or fun stuff to engage devs (like foosball tables, original & old machines running Mario, a better coffee than the free one, etc).

The attendees would generally do three things (when not hungry):

• attend (… well of course) and then during the breaks hurry to another of the many conference rooms situated on four different floors,
• grab a coffee/tea/water on the way,
• engage with the people at the booths or rest in chillout areas

Because of the size of the event, on the first day it was impossible for everybody to get food during the lunch break, even if there were six restaurants there. Devs got creative and bombarded the event app with #WeAreHungry messages next to the official #WeAreDevelopers hashtag. Anyway, no one died of hunger so no worries there.

Woodstock of developers

This was the subtitle of the event and I can say it was so true. Participants spoke the same language (like wysiwyg), wore the geeky goodie bags that the organizers had prepared (see below), and danced in the club after party (@Praterdome, which I expected to be bigger and play techno music) — even if it turned out to be a retro party after all.

Probably everybody had the official WeAreDevs app installed, which was totally useful. It had live notifications, schedule, favorites, maps, people, profile and a FB-like Activity Stream channel. Really nice. It only crashed one afternoon, and then the notifications were sent through the hallway speakers, just like in train stations. Good old “real voice notification” tech, never lets us down :)

You don’t mess with the fire regulations

Sometimes there was a huge interest for some presentations that were scheduled in smaller rooms. I was at one of them during the first day, seats were full, so we placed our bottoms on the comfy floor. No problem, right? Wrong: the fire marshals told the presenter something in his ear … so the presenter was like: guys I have good news — you are so many that I am taking a picture of the full room right now (… click), and bad news — everyone without a seat needs to get out right now, or the fire marshals will shut down the conference. This happened multiple times during the conference, but the organizers were prompt and re-streamed the live event in one of the other many rooms.

Conclusion

In the end this was a big event, there were great talks, good atmosphere, and when problems occurred, they were addressed quickly. I heard a ton of languages and occasionally talked to guys from Austria, Netherlands, UK and Germany. Videos should also be made publicly available within the upcoming weeks. Would I recommend this event? Totally.