After attending over 15 conferences, I decided to make my first call to papers on a subject that is very dear to all: using standards for git-commit messages. To my surprise, one month later, I got a confirmation email saying my talk got accepted. My journey as a public speaker commenced. This post is about the 3 days of the We Are Developers - World Congress in Berlin.
Table of Contents
Open Table of Contents
26.07.2023 - Speakers event
Stackoverflow organized the speaker event out in Tiergarten (West Berlin) where I had the chance of meeting a fellow speaker from Spain @chemaclass, an experienced tech lead also based out of Berlin and @marcopodien, one of the hosts of the micro stages and a berlin (born and bread) technology evangelist.
The event was entertaining, the catering was outstanding, and most importantly, we had the chance to mingle with other speakers and the Austrian organizers. We also heard that Stackoverflow had a new AI-based product line being presented the next day at 13:30 on the main stage.
27.07.2023 - Day 1
First day of the conference and first talk by no other than Sir Tim Berners-Lee in the main room, followed by a plethora of events on smaller stages and distributed over 3 floors in 2 buildings.
The space and organization were top-notch. The only minor complaint is that the micro stages were in open spaces, so the level of noise from the booths or the mere fact that you had more attendees than expected would make it pretty loud.
One of the highlights of the conference was the talk from john romero, an award-winning game creator and his experience in the first year of development of the game DOOM. It was amazing to see the month-by-month evolution of DOOM.
From 6pm to 8pm networking on the booths was encouraged as some of the booths offered entertaining games as well as drinks and beverages. In these 2 hours I met Sascha Stansheit, tech enthusiast with great energy interested in the topic i was presenting. Also met Valerio Lasso, berlin based spanish java developer and his colleagues from Dataguard, was great to hear they already use one of the standards (gitmoji) in their organization.
Moving between the main building and hall 2.2, we discovered Dockers booth and their fantastic DDH Pale Ale; great effort getting customized (sexy) can for the event AND the tastiest beer at the conference.
From 8pm onwards, we were all gathered in the main room where they had Deepl’s hackathon event. Around then, I started to think about my talk and how it was nearly 12 hours away. So I decided to wrap it up around 10pm and get my ass home before midnight to get some rest before my big day.
28.07.2023 - Day 2
Woke up much earlier than needed, pretty anxious and a bundle of nerves - no chance I can go back to sleep now. Started doing some runs of the speech to calculate timing and go over the slides for the last time.
I made it to the event venue a good hour before my talk, giving me time to grab a quick bite, check out micro stage 1, and meet the stage host and sound engineer. @chemaclass was kind to give me a few tips. For example, as it was my first talk, i should mention this to the crowd and maybe even take a selfie.
To my surprise, 504 people were interested in my event 30mins before it started, which didn’t help with my nerves; in the end, half of them made it.
It was all over in just under 11mins. First public talk DONE! Couldn’t believe it. What a great feeling of accomplishment.
Thanks to the supportive attendees who were very kind for asking further questions that came up to me after the talk.
After my talk was over, it was my turn to support other speakers. I assisted with Chema’s talk on PHEL, which happened one hour after mine. Having been exposed to Elm and Clojure, I was familiar with the main concepts of the Lisp-based language and was curious about its interoperability with PHP and its world of existing packages. It was amazing how he was able to give a lightning talk with a live demo included in under 10 mins when it could easily have been done in a 30min regular talk.
The afternoon continued with more networking and talks. After Chemaclass’s second and last talk (an introduction to extreme programming), I was ready to wrap it up and disconnect. 3 days of intense networking and talking with like-minded nerds had taken its toll, so I decided to leave the conference.
I must say I am extremely satisfied after this first experience as a speaker, and I will definitely repeat it.