With 5000+ attendees and 200+ speakers, it is fair to say that “We Are Developers World Congress” is a massive event. After the limited opportunities for conferences lately, it was an unfamiliar yet refreshing experience to be around so many people again. It was our first time at the WAD World Congress, and it was great to see so many folks stop by our booth. We were happy about the interest and enjoyed talking about INNOQ, discussing the latest trends and opportunities, and of course handing out our own books and swag.
In particular our t-shirts, bearing the slogan “Code knows no gender” proved wildly popular. We created the artwork for female students participating in the Girls’Day, but apparently we struck a chord: In our perception, the conference was a lot more diverse than other developer conferences in Germany. Diversity stands for more than gender; we had a chance to chat with attendees from all around the world, and of all age groups.
Since our colleagues were quite busy at the booth, they did not have a lot of time to watch talks live. But they did manage to catch some keynotes, for example:
- C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup taking us on a journey from conception to modern-day C++, explaining language design principles, tradeoffs, and standards;
- GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke attempting to do a live demo of some cool GitHub features, while struggling with the projector, as a nice reminder that even executives are not immune against such problems;
- Joel Spolsky of Stack Overflow and Laurie Voss of Netlify, giving two very different perspectives on the current state and outlining their future visions of the web;
- CSS inventor Håkon Wium Lie showed modern CSS features and how to do book-style page layouting with web technologies.
Our colleagues Lars and Isabel delivered two talks:
Isabel, together with Kilian Kluge spoke about model governance and explainable AI as tools for legal compliance and risk management
Lars showed some advanced examples of TypeScript’s type system
Links above will take you to the relevant slides and video recordings of our two speakers.
Both Isabel and Lars presented on a “Microstage” with 80 seats, that ended up being a touch too small given the massive interest in their talks.
At the booth, we had many in-depth talks about our company, the culture, how we work and what makes us different. The interest in our work opportunities was also strong, in contrast to our experience with many other conferences in Germany.
We really enjoyed the open-minded and curious crowd, and are already looking forward to attending the WAD World Congress next year!
