#WeAreDevs Vienna 2018

So, last week I went to the #WeAreHiring; no wait a sec’, that’s not it’s real name. Give me a second … #WeAreAdvertising? Oh, it’s just WeAreDevelopers World Congress Vienna 2018! Yes, definitely #WeAreDevs. You know, the congress with Steve the Woz Wozniak, some guys from Microsoft, Google and so on.

Sacrificing the golden calf of coding – Christian Heilmann

Why the confused name …? Because I really thought it’s all about software engineering, development, testing, building cool things (like gems or toys or mobile apps). Surprisingly it’s more about hiring people, which is just annoying - especially if you wanted to learn cool new stuff about software development or make new friendships by hacking code together.

The Congress

Starting with Steve Wozniak about all and everything within uprising technology (you might be able to watch it on Youtube, too), the congress started well with over 8.000 people attending to 6 stages with different talks. Speaking about Stories, Backend and Frontend development, automation, VR, Security, Testing and lots of other interesting things. So I started into a good session, full of interesting people to listen to! I heard about nginx unit, apache kafka, managing cloud deployments well, beeing better at development, doing nodejs right, - there was a lot of awesome talkers to hear!

A talk that I got inspired was Christian Heilmann’s Sacrificing the golden calf of coding. It’s all about software engineering and to use software (development) right. Because why bother with the legendary Tabs vs Spaces anyway? Stop rebuilding/redefining your work; there even is a machine-learning tool building HTML based on your screenshots.

Another interesting talk was given by Sara Viera Your brain does not have a fix flag, inspired by eslint --fix. What a genius funny little women!

The good and the bad things

Something very crude was: hey guys, I heard you like to go home early, so we stopped serving coffee since 3pm. Just why? The planned congress appears to be 6pm. Do you want provoke the mob?

Something I want to applaud at is the performance of the wifi. I’ve never seen such a big congress, with a working wifi, but this time it was all about performing well and absolutely solid. But, why the heck did you need to remove the wifi password for all attendees on the second day? Aren’t developers able to type in a simple wifi password (seen on every displayed across the whole location)?

Do you want to work with us?

Apart from the talks on stage, there was a lot to discover on the congress: many companies showed off some technologies and frameworks they work with. And like many, they wanted everyone to work with them. No sorry, I just wanted to look at what you’re building right here (a duck on the monitor is an eye-catcher - thank you for trapping me in). So everywhere I looked or I went they wanted to hire me. By the way, I’m happy at my work and I don’t want to leave.

After all, I saw many people at the conference, talk to most of them and were able to learn some nice tricks. At all, it was a success for me, but I think I’ll never attend (as an attendee) to the WeAreDevelpers World Congress again.