Wrap-up: code.kiwi.com events in 2018
The year of 2018 can be summarised in just two numbers: 23 and 166.
If you’re curious about the meaning behind these numbers and what we achieved last year, read on!
As for the number 23, altogether, we were present in 23 unique countries.
The number 166 stands for all the events we put our hands on and includes conferences, meetups, workshops and educational weekends that we organised, co-organised, provided speakers to, and sponsored.
Most of the events took place in the Czech Republic — 99 to be precise, out of which 70 were in Brno and 29 in Prague — but we also organised events at all the places where we run our remote offices (such as Barcelona, Bratislava or Split) and our speakers travelled to Saint Petersburg, San Francisco, Lima and others.
A couple of highlights of 2018
- Our data challenge based on the Travelling Salesman Problem attracted 1,000+ developers worldwide.
- We sold out the Forum on Women in Tech (350 attendees).
- We brought nine non-Kiwi devs to our Summer Camp in Barcelona to work on some projects with us and to get a taste of working for Kiwi.com.
- We organised seven different educational weekends (4x Python, 2x DevOps and one for JavaScript) and a UX hackathon. This way we shared our knowledge with 150+ people.
- We connected eight different European cities via one event. The speakers of the JS Road Tour event spent 14 days on the road.
- Our Tech Lead Jiří Beneš spoke at EuroPython and we sponsored the event, and our devs travelled to conferences worldwide, such as PyCon US.
Supporting students and NGOs
Through different student associations and events we organised for students, we supported more than 200 students. Some of them joined us for a summer internship and they still continue working for us.
Similarly, we regularly supported Czechitas on their mission to bring more women into the IT world while providing them with a venue, lectors and mentors for their Digital Academy.
Top content on our blog and YouTube
Altogether, there were 27 articles published on our blog, the most popular ones are listed below, if you want to check them out or refresh what they were about:
- Memory efficiency of parallel IO operations in Python by Jakub Wolf — his text made it to no. 1 in Hacker News,
- Our comprehensive guide to Python dependencies by Nagy Bence was selected for Python Weekly,
- GraphQL pitfalls by Martin Zlámal.
If you prefer watching to reading, check out our top four YouTube videos:
- Kiwi.com’s CIO David Pavlík discusses innovations at our Silicon Valley meetup (June 2018),
- Our CPO Petra Vaškových is sharing what we learned scaling the engineering teams at the Forum on Women in Tech (May 2018),
- To phish or not to phish? Check the talk by Ján Masarik, Kiwi.com’s Platform Security Engineer (October 2018),
- Better developer experience via building for Slack by Bence Nagy, our Software Platform Lead (October 2018)
It wouldn’t be a real event without the merch!
Last but not least, the complimentary stuff you get at events is often something people just can’t leave without. In 2018, we handed out more than 1,500 bottle openers and pens, 5,000 stickers and 500+ kilos of bananas.
However, the most desired merch we have are our new camera covers, there will definitely be more of these in 2019 and the number of events where you can get them will definitely grow, too. Subscribe to our newsletter not to miss them!
See you soon!
