We Went to DevDay!
As we have the last few years, esveo were at Dresden’s very own DevDay conference, as a mixed group of sponsors, speakers, and participants. Here’s what we thought!
DevDay is a free, one-day conference located at the exhibition ground here in Dresden, with workshops, talks, and time to network. It’s a great chance to see what’s happening in local developer circles, and see what sort of things other people are working on or with. There’s always a big variety of topics to hear about and discuss.
This year, our entire development team was there, we had a stand, and I gave a talk. I’ve asked our team what their impressions were, and gathered them here for you.
On the Sessions
This year was full of talks! 26 talks in total, packed into six tracks over the course of the afternoon. Luckily there we enough of us that we could divide and conquer! Of particular note for us was the keynote from Dr. Carola Lilienthal.
> 'I listened to Martin Schurz's presentation “Food for thought”, where he simply collected a few interesting ideas from his projects and threw them into the room as a 'suggestion'. It wasn't so much a presentation that wanted to sell you some feature or technology, but more a presentation that simply gave some insights (sometimes in a very funny way) into the problems and solutions from another company. My highlights there were above all 'just let gitleaks loose on everything you find' and 'testing in production vs testing of production'."
> "Carola Lilienthal's keynote was very impressive for me. As a “Quereinsteiger” (someone who’s moved from a different career) in software development, I got to know many modern concepts (from testing to system architecture to modern team structures) as a given, mostly in the context of application. My engineering degree taught me how to work on complex problems and solve them step by step, but the background to why we do things the way we do in software development today was not part of my training. Carola showed very impressively what challenges and problems had to be overcome to get to where we are today as software developers."
> "The keynote speech by Dr. Carola Lilienthal was very informative for me. She showed well thought-out approaches on how to better plan projects and software architectures in order to save costs and time."
On Giving a Talk
I was lucky enough to be accepted to give a talk this year about Jujutsu, a new version control system. These are my impressions of how that went.
> "This was a difficult talk to write, because it was so hard to get the tone right: give people enough context that they can understand what I’m trying to show, but not so much that they get bored! But I was pleased with the result, and the response seemed positive — lots of questions, and lots of people who told me they wanted to try Jujutsu out."
On Being a Sponsor
This year, we were one of the official sponsors of DevDay, which was a first for the company. We had a stall offering Esveo-branded merch, and an open competition to see who could beat us at code golf. In the end, we remained victorious, but along the way we had plenty of useful and interesting conversations with other attendees.
> "I thought it was cool that we were able to present our company at a stand outside of the presentations that we often give at conferences and that we may have been remembered by some visitors as a sponsor. This helps to make us and our services more accessible to a wider audience."
> "It was really great how well our merch was received. You could see the smiles on people's faces when they saw our stickers or our IDE notepad."
Conclusion
If you’ve never been to DevDay, and you’re based in the Dresden area — come! It’s a great place to meet other developers and hear all sorts of interesting talks. I’m looking forward to next year’s already.
