One of best opportunities I have gotten so far from moving to Europe is perhaps the ability to participate in tech conferences. Back in Bangladesh, I would have never imagined running into Ryan Dahl or meeting people working in OpenAI and Spotify. As someone pretty invested in tech, these opportunities are deeply fulfilling.
A week ago I had the pleasure of attending and helping out at DevWorld Conference. The 2 day event was held at RAI Amsterdam. It boasted an incredible 7k number of participants. I love helping out at conferences like these. Partly for the perks that come with it and partly because I feel it is my small way of giving back to the community. In between my responsibilities I was able to attend talks, network with people and win awesome swag!
Talks
First up we had, the co-founder of GitHub, Scott Chacon give us a part 2 of his FOSSDEM talk about new Git features. I missed his talk back in Brussels but I’m glad I was able to catch this one. I learned a bunch of cool stuff about Git that I did not know yet I have been using git for around a decade now.
The DevWorld slides can be found on the GitButler blog and the talk itself should be on Youtube soon. Takeaways for me: git commit --fixup and git rebase --autosquash definitely looks like something I’ll be using. And worktree is something I wish I had know about sooner.
The next one I loved was from Will Scougal about Augmented Reality and it’s potential in advertising. At one point, his slides mentioned that “positivity is contagious” and that was exactly the vibe I was getting from the very colourful slides 😅.
I thought the numbers were eye opening. Indeed, AR could already be a great place to advertise your services as the audience is growing and are more engaged. I was also made aware of the potential of WebAR. During the video demos, I was also quite surprised to see some of the existing AR campaigns.
Next day we had Shai Reznik dishing out truths about JavaScript apps and Qwik in his magicians costume. The promise of zero cost performance sounds too good to be true.
I got to learn a bit about JavaScript streaming which is different from HTML streaming. I also learned that Miško Hevery loves data jokes!
Finally, we got to see Ryan Dahl launch jsr.io. I know what it sounds like— “another NPM?”. But personally I felt this could be game changer. It is supposed to co-exist with NPM and give developers a better experience publishing modern TypeScript.
There are some interesting choices that JSR makes and I would encourage you to go read their reasoning. It ended with an awesome live demo and I for one am sold!
Some of the other talks I enjoyed were about concurrency, microservices, Backstage, video optimisation and Solid.js.
Disneyland for developers
That is what the conference was advertising itself as(Disneyland for developers). Maybe one could disagree but it was, in fact, quite fun! There was an arcade section and part of my responsibility as volunteer was actually to take care of this place! I really enjoyed myself and had a blast!
There was awesome swag to be won. Every sponsor seemed to have a lego giveaway! I nabbed this awesome bottle from a Postman giveaway!
And this is what I looked like 😅 📸 👇🏾. As you can see I was have an awesome time!
Top comments (1)
Thanks for the overview.