code.kiwi.com 2022 wrap-up
2023 finally arrived, and we cannot be more excited about the upcoming tech community projects, but let’s take a moment to look at all the amazing things that happened in code.kiwi.com in 2022. Grab a cup of your favorite something and.. hey ho let’s go!
The number of the year — 121. This is how often you could have seen citizens of Kiwi.com’s Engineering department speaking at a meetup or a conference, mentoring educational projects, writing articles and more. Kudos to all of the amazing community champions putting so much soul into these activities!
Kiwis also contributed to the code.kiwi.com blog by writing 10 blog posts and we have published 13 videos with amazing technical content to our code.kiwi.com YouTube channel.
Locations of the year — Brno, Prague, Bratislava, Košice, Barcelona, Belgrade, Budapest, Dublin, Labin, Zagreb, Vienna… and more!
Let’s look closer at the biggest community events and projects in 2022 by code.kiwi.com .
Educational projects, hackathons and jams
As a team responsible for the tech community at Kiwi.com, we must say that 2022 has been very generous and fruitful. It would be too long to list all projects with the “by Kiwi.com” stamp on it, but here are some of the events we enjoyed the most.
Python Weekend
With Kiwi.com Python developers we organized 4 Python Weekends in 4 locations — Budapest, Brno, Košice and Barcelona. 921 Python developers applied to the project. We welcomed 63 Python Weekend attendees. 23 Kiwi.com Pythonistas proudly wore mentor t-shirts this year. 160 Python Weekend stickers were distributed. We spent 10 full work days together with our attendees this year to learn now to build your own teeny-tiny Kiwi.com in the most fun way possible.
Stay tuned, don’t miss the announcement of Python Weekends in 2023.
Data Day
Not only Python developers were active in the tech community in 2022. This year we introduced project Data Day.
Data Day is a full day of workshops and networking for the engineers and data analysts interested in Data Engineering and Data Analysis. Data Day is dedicated to build a full fledged real life inspired data use case — end to end, extract, clean/manipulate, transform and analyse data, work together to find insights and value and, of course, meet our data employees who are ready to share their knowledge. This year Data Day visited 2 cities — Barcelona and Bratislava.
Cypress Weekend in Bratislava
Cypress Weekend, the first hackathon of its kind in our region. Over two days we challenged our attendees in the testing tool — Cypress. Teams were working on Front End, Back End testing and the Mailosaurus plugin. We were happy to see the determination, knowledge and team spirit demonstrated by the participants. After the event, the attendees’ feedback shined with happiness and appreciation.
The next Cypress Weekend, the Spring edition is coming! This time we will meet in Brno on the first weekend in April.
Global Travel Jam
Our annual event for designers — Global Travel Jam — happened this year in our HQ in Brno, and it was just a blast!
The challenge this year was about conducting a diary study, identifying key areas that need improvement and designing concrete solutions. Ioannis, our UX Researcher and a mentor during GTJ said, “the challenge itself is hectic and requires creativity and critical thinking.”
Read more about it here!
Techweek
One of our biggest projects of the year, Techweek featured a whopping number of 16 events over 8 days. The events took place in the main Kiwi.com locations — Brno, Prague, Bratislava, Košice and Barcelona, and also Belgrade.
The attendees had a chance to get to know several topics related to Mobile, Infrastructure, Design, Python, Data and much more! Part of the week was a mini conference Brno Mobile (or BrMo) and Design Reunion — get-together of the design community in Prague.
Check some of the recordings from the week on our YouTube channel!
Mobile Leads Meetup
Together with Cleevio, STRV and DactylGroup, we kicked off a little bit of an unusual meetup — a panel discussion, where leaders of teams working with Mobile technologies answer questions about leadership, technology and everything in between. See the whole event recording here.
Tech Conferences in 2022
EuroPython 2022 in Dublin
In the summer coding kiwis enjoyed travel to Dublin for the oldest community-led (and our favorite!) Python programming conference — EuroPython.
Although speakers and participants were given the opportunity to participate in the conference online, 1000+ Python developers from all over the world attended the conference in person, in Ireland. I must say, it was truly amazing to reconnect with friendly Python programmers after the break in in-person events, and meet each other again for Python talks, followed by the EuroPython party, sponsored by Kiwi.com!
PyCon SK in Bratislava
September was highlighted with the trip to Bratislava for our Python developers. It was a 3 day conference full of talks and networking. Kiwis were proud to facilitate the MicroPython workshop and give several lightning talks.
Want to see how it went? Check out the photos.
ML Prague 2022 in Prague
Machine Learning Prague is the biggest ML conference in Europe, and kiwis ran most likely one of the biggest paper plane contests in the history of tech conferences at their booth. Aidan Francis Gogarty, Senior Data Scientist at Kiwi.com, did an amazing job moderating workshops on Synthetic Data Generation for Computer Vision and Reverse Image Search.
DevRelCon in Prague
First in-person DevRelCon after the pandemic break came to the beautiful city of Prague and it was lit! We were happy to work together with Hoopy on the organization of the conference to bring folks from across the world to learn about developer relations, community management, employer branding in tech, and more. Our tech community manager Alena Osipova was the member of the program committee and presented the topic ‘One DevRel hat and 500 devs to wear it’ to tell the story of the internal community of developers at Kiwi.com.
SHIFT Conference in Rijeka
One of the biggest conferences we have visited in 2022 definitely has to be SHIFT in Croatia. The conference for the global tech community included a full two days of learning, networking, and creating new memories. A gathering of professionals, founders, leaders, disruptors, and dreamers — altogether 5000+ participants. What’s not to like? You were able to meet us there at our Kiwi.com booth!
Digital Labin Conference
Digital Labin is one of a kind ICT conference featuring speakers in Web, Mobile and Software design and Development. Over two days, attendees can attend professional workshops, mingle, network and party with like-minded people.
Famous frontend architects, code wizards and design specialists from all over the world are gathered at the same place, bringing the hottest talks and fresh knowledge from the IT industry. You could have met us at our booth or attended one of the talks and workshops by Kiwi.com experts, Vladimir Končar, Milan Seitler or William Kolmačka.
HackKosice hackathon
Hack Kosice is an annual hackathon and brings together a community of talents. Building people’s wildest ideas in 24 hours, surrounded with great designers, entrepreneurs, ideators in a hyped atmosphere. We were very happy to contribute to that atmosphere with our Kiwi.com group of mentors!
Community help
Apart from organizing, co-organizing and making guest appearances at events, we have helped to co-create several events with our friends from other communities by lending our offices or helping in other ways — great initiatives like Pyladies Bratislava, Cesko.Digital CopyDay, GUGování by GUG.cz, Missing Maps Mapathon by Doctors without borders, local OWASP meetup and the WomenHack event. And that’s not even all of them! We are so grateful to be in such a great company!
How was the year in terms of tech community team visibility?
Our community managers also did an amazing job spreading the word about what we are doing as professionals. If you are curious about developer relations and tech community management, watch recordings of CBW 2022 (Community Builders World), DevRelCon or Community chatter meetup.
Welcome, 2023!
And this is not the end. We plan to do more community awesomeness in 2023.
You can look forward to meeting our speakers at various meetups and conferences, as well as to Kiwi.com organized events.
Be sure to follow our social media (Twitter, Facebook or Instagram), our code.kiwi.com newsletter or add our IT calendar, where we share the upcoming events and more!
