WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2024

Earlier in the year I was looking for conferences and events to attend. I was feeling the need to jump back into the deep end, to discover the latest innovations and best practice across various aspects of website development.

Initially I discounted the WeAreDevelopers World Congress due to cost. However, I was foruntate enough to win a ticket to the 2-day event, held in Berlin, and EasyJet had some cheap flights available. I took the plunge and organised the trip. And I’m very glad I did!

Held at Messe Berlin the event brought together 15,000 developers from around the globe, along with tech start-ups, global technology giants like Intel and a wide range of expert speakers.

I flew in to Berlin on the Wednesday morning and spent the rest of the day sight seeing. I’d visited Berlin once previously and enjoyed walking through Tiergarten to the Brandenburg Gate. The Euros had only finished a few days before and teams were hard at work de-rigging the temporary TV studios and fan park which had been put together for the tournement. I passed the Reichstag and then found my way to the German Museum of Technology and later visited the East Side Gallery.

Berlin’s S-Bahn rail system makes getting around the city really easy. Messe Berlin is located right next to an S-Bahn stop, so it was quite straight forward getting from my backpackers hostel accommodation in the city centre to the conference venue. First stop, coffee!

The conference was held across 3 massive rooms as well as outside space. There were multiple stages, each with a packed programme of speakers. I spent some time planning which talks to attend, focussing on the things which are most important to me as a full-stack web developer.

I think I attended at least 12 talks over the two days and took plenty of notes, which I plan to write up into blog posts over the next few weeks.

There was a good mixture of in-depth explanations of code as well as talks which were more about business practice, entrepreneurialism, the future of technology, leadership and so on. The hosts did a great job keeping everything running to time and despite there being lots going on in the same space I found it quite easy focus on the talks, even as people were moving about and chatting nearby. It was very well organised.

Alongside the talks there were loads of stalls to visit. These were run by different technology companies. They included everyone from global hardware giants like Intel and Nvidia to software vendors like Figma and Twilio, right down to tiny tech start-ups looking to share their idea with the developer community.

I enjoyed chatting with a few vendors, including Auth0 which I’ll be using on an up-coming project.

Outside there were food trucks, plenty of space to relax and unwind in the sunshine and chat with fellow developers.

The big tech firms were keen to show off their latest developments and enthuse developers about their particular platforms. There’s a lot of chatter around AI at the moment, and this seemed to be the focus of many of the vendors, such as Intel who were demonstrating some visual AI technology.

Google were also present, highlighting their cloud computing offering. More on that in a future post.

I had a good chat with a guy from Hedera who are developing a responsibly managed decentralised blockchain network. Like most people, the only thing I really know about blockchain is that it’s used for Bitcoin and other digital currencies as well as for NFTs which are sometimes used to validate things like digital art.

It seems that this technology can be used much more broadly to demonstrate the authenticity and ownership of any asset – so I expect we will begin to see blockchain being used increasingly widely. Perhaps a good use case will be journalism and photography, where proving authenticity and truth will become increasingly important.

I’m not a frequent traveller, but I really love visiting Europe. I’d really recommend Berlin to anyone looking for an easy to reach European destination. There’s plenty to see and do, whether you’re travelling alone, as a couple or a larger group.

And I’d love to return to WeAreDevelopers. It was such a friendly event, with a great atmosphere. I learned a lot and enjoyed connecting with other developers. It really did re-ignite my enthusiasm for web development and I’ve come home brimming with ideas and areas of my practice I want to improve.

For me, becoming a better developer is all about being able to provide a better service to my customers, developing innovative solutions to tricky problems using the most appropriate technologies.

It wasn’t long before I was back at the airport awaiting my flight home. And yes, my flight was delayed by the CrowdStrike outage! That was a stark reminder to all of us developers to test our code thoroughly before pushing it live. Even apparently small mistakes can have far-reaching unintended consequences and cause big problems.