So I attended this year’s WeAreDevelopers conference among 15000 other developers.

Overall I must say - I was a bit disappointed by most talks. I was expecting more in-depth technical talks, and instead, most talks did not go into any depth.

There was still some insight to be gained.

I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords

AI still reigns supreme in the dev world. Most talks included AI in some way.

The big players are working on bringing the overall cost down, while improving the overall quality - as they should. Price is probably the biggest issue at the moment, as it severely limits the number of tokens tools send in their requests, which in turn decreases the quality of the result.

And yet - most live demos showcasing new AI functionalities did not actually work on stage :D

AI will, without a doubt, still be the hottest topic for the time to come.

Being optimistic about React 19

Aurora Scharff gave my favourite tech-talk of the conference!

She presented an accessibility-focused component library called ariakit I was not aware of - that I will definitely check out soon.

She also talked about upcoming React 19 features like useOptimistic that I was vaguely aware of, but never actually saw in action. I like those new features - as someone who is not a huge fan of current React, it’s nice to see cool new features on the horizon.

Flawless live presentation and a very good talk overall. I will follow her blog from now on :)

Tales from the Crypt(o)

I never really got into crypto and NFTs still baffle me. Therefore I am delighted to say that the hype is pretty much gone at this moment.

Sure - bitcoin is, at the moment of writing, at an all time high (around $120k) but conferences used to be flooded with crypto companies.

This might actually be a good thing for the crypto community, though. The companies that still thrive are the ones who found actual useful use cases and are now dominating in those niches.

It is a shame, though, that I feel like the dream of decentralized currencies seems to have been lost on the way.

Architecture meets Business

Gernot Starke - the creator of arc42 was also present! I met him randomly before his talk and he was shocked that someone actually recognized him haha!

He talked about a concise way to display architecture on a module / service basis: Software Architecture Canvas

I generally believe in one-pagers for services or domains. I do normally put these info in the README.md. Would be fun to find a way to get this Canvas into the README.md too.

Doom in the Game industry

Back in the day I worked on some small games every now and then. If the industry wasn’t so big on crunching and underpaying developers I would probably still be doing that.

So getting the chance to talk to John Romero and Warren Spector sparked something in me that I thought long lost.

It’s just so inspiring to see them work on their passion after all these years!

That being said, working in the game industry can be tough for other reasons as well. Just this week Romero Games was laid off entirely by Microsoft. Sucks.

Conclusion

Even though I consider myself an extrovert, I must say this conference drained me.

Next time, I will probably be looking for a smaller conference with deeper dives into technical topics that actually interest me.

Also at this point of my career, I should probably strive for speaker roles rather than simply attending.