I spent this past week in the beautiful city of Krakow, Poland for the spectacular DevConf Poland. Thinking this is a new conference is far from the truth, as the organizers have run DevDays since 2011, changing the name this year. From what I hear, they have not changed not the fantastic experience.
I was accepted to give my talk, Fending Off Zombies With OTP, and speaking at the conference was one of the best speaking experiences to date.
As a speaker
As expected of most conferences, DevConf took care of my travel and lodging expenses for the conference. They took it even further though and provided speakers with a business Uber account to use while in Poland. Before even boarding a flight, the organizers made sure everything was taken care of; going as far as approving me to buy an entirely new plane ticket if needed after a snafue left my ticket booked under the name Dave Long instead of David Long as it should have been. From the moment I arrived in Poland I felt welcomed. Michał Śliwoń, one of the organizers, picked me up from the airport to bring me to the AirBNB that I was staying in and made sure I was situated.
The speakers dinner was thrown at an amazing Polish restaurant and from that moment on, the organizers made sure that everyone, speakers and attendees, was comfortable and enjoying themselves. After a night of excitement with the conferences CEO (Chief Entertainment Officer), Rafał Legiędź, the conference began and what followed was three tracks of fantastic talks covering many topics.
As an attendee
Coming out of the Dev Days conferences, many people might think of DevConf as a .NET conference. There were a number of talks covering various Microsoft-esque topics such as Azure ML and Cake, but there were also talks on JavaScript bug management and IoT, as well as fantastic talks about avoiding bikeshedding, basic machine learning, and keynotes on whether robots are going to take over the world and how developers can market their products. My talk, as well, went deeply into building OTP applications in Elixir.
Final thoughts
If you trying to pick a conference to attend in 2018, I absolutely recommend this conference. It is very clear that the organizers love what they do and it shows in every part of the conference, from the presentations during the day to the after events. The city is one of the most beautiful that I’ve seen and, even if not attending DevConf, you need to go see it.