Some thoughts on DevTalks Bucharest 2024

I'm an exceedingly lucky person, over the years I've had the opportunity to attend and speak at (including very last minute) multiple DevTalks events. And I was exceedingly happy to be invited to both moderate and speak at the 11th edition in Bucharest between May 29th & 30th.

If you'd like a full run-down of all the speakers, talks, and activities they had I'd check out the website https://www.devtalks.ro/ and the very active social media they run.

I will admit that on day two, I spent nearly every moment on the product world stage being a moderator so all my thoughts on that are limited. But I can at least share about day one, and the expo booth. So here are my thoughts about the event.

Expo

Let's get the expo out of the way first, as that covers both days. In the event space, it had a HUGE expo between all the stages with amazing brands that I recognised and huge booths from local brands I didn't. You could chill and work in a dedicated workspace area that came with quiet/meeting room pods, and you could play with or watch so many robots including football and drawing… it was nuts.

And the refreshments just kept coming! Amazing food trucks outside, coffee from plenty of Nespresso Professional machines with baristas, beers from Heineken (I can't stand the beer, but at least it was available), and all-you-can-drink soft drinks from Pepsi.

Day One

Unfortunately, after a very stressful travel day into Bucharest from sunny Birmingham I slept in a little so I missed the opening speech and keynote (sorry dear reader). But I did manage to catch some awesome talks between bumping into old friends.

The first talk I managed to stand at the back for was Francesco Ciulla from Daily.dev on the Web Stage. The talk was titled Evolution of Web Development and I enjoyed hearing about how the culmination of standards was being used by Daily.dev to produce an amazing experience that's scalable across browsers.

Next up I saw some of Vanessa Villa from Pangea on the DevLead Stage. This talk was something a little different for me as I'm not an IoT person beyond a little smart home tech, it was titled "IoT Evolution: Where is it now?". I'll admit she had my curiosity about the industrial applications of IoT right now, but I'm far removed from that, unfortunately.

Another talk from the DevLead stage had me watching my old friend Alex Lakatos from Interledger. "Building a Developer-first Culture" was the title, and this one was way too close to home for me. Having seen how Alex evolved this process, and how true it is. The biggest key takeaway is, with a small team, set the collaborative and open framework early so that everyone wants to get involved with sharing how awesome the product they work on is!

The final talk of day one that I got to see was Elad Shechter from Appwrite on the Web Stage. His talk, titled "Update Your < Style >!", involved a lot of CSS, and seemed like black magic. But it was interesting to see how he implemented a grid as someone terrible at CSS.

Day Two

Day two was a little different, I was moderating all day so I sat on one stage and watched it all. I was also a little stupid and forgot to take photos and post them to social media for future reference.

I was moderating the Product World Stage that was powered by METRO.digital (the digital wing of the METRO supermarkets). So it's only fitting that day two was opened up by representatives from METRO.digital.

First up, we had Adrian Postelnicu who is the CPO for METRO.digital setting the scene for the day.

Immediately from Adrian, we were introduced to Aura Virgolici (Engineering Manager at METRO.digital) & Irina Poiana (Domain Owner at METRO.digital). They gave a talk titled "Bridging the Gap: A Journey to High-Performing Teams" and it was about the pain points of a digital transformation program METRO.digital) went through.

The second full talk of the day was from Nesrine Changuel giving a talk named "The Secret to Crafting Lovable Tech Products". Here she covered the idea of "delight" which was an interesting concept for features that don't necessarily bring direct ROI but do engage and make users love a product. You can even download the Product Delight Map from the talk.

Our first AI talk of the day was given by Miro Alexandrov from Ipsos, his talk was "Leveraging Generative AI and Product Management Frameworks: How Ipsos is transforming Market Research". I did enjoy how he described Ipsos's use of AI to classify and enhance the existing research they have to improve and speed up projects.

The last talk before the lunch break was Lucian Gruia from Ciklum. The talk "Coding Privacy - Aware Enterprise AI with RAG Architecture" was an overview of RAG and how it's implemented, which for someone like me who knows little about the implementation was a great starter.

After lunch we had Dan-Mihai Dinu from Bolt who had the most dramatic and interesting start to his talk with costumes and all. The talk itself was called "Bolt Food: The Secret Recipe" and was an interesting run-through on the speed of development and iteration that Bolt has gone through with projects.

The next talk from Stefan Tudor Murariu was titled "The essential tools for early-stage product companies". His talk was about product development, giving some insight into getting over those first hurdles for finding product fit.

Following on we had two speakers from Swissquote, Edwige Fiaclou (Head Software Engineer Tech Talent & Methodologies) and Laetitia Aegerter-Cuello
(Senior Agile Coach). The session "Agility à la carte: Product and Delivery a tasty combination for innovation" was a fun (it had Toblerone!) walk-through the Disciplined Agile process and it's effects on product delivery at Swissquote.

Our last AI talk of the day was from George Dita with a talk titled "Empower Your Product Management with AI: Enhance, Don’t Replace Your Unique Skills". George gave a breakdown of a toolchain they use for decision-making and process automation around product management.

The final talk of the day (hurray it's over) was from yours truly, with the help of my friend Mike Dolha (you can find him on Instagram, LinkedIn, or his podcast). My talk was "The ABC of DX", which was meant to be a practical guide to things organisations can do to improve internal and external Developer Experience so people love what they're building on or with. Mike then drove a quite hilarious Q&A session at the end. If you'd like a write-up of this talk and my thoughts etc please feel free to add a comment.

The conclusion

DevTalks is an event that will always hold a special place in my heart, but Ow My God is it so busy! You cannot convey everything you could learn in a simple post. If you have the opportunity to attend, you should as Romania is a beautiful country with lovely cities (and food). And if you'd like to give a talk, the organisation behind it always runs a CFP. They also have a bunch of other events throughout the year