After a very intense last year and global community building with Infobip Connect Meetups across Africa, Europe, and North America, this year we’re continuing to organize our meetups. We’re also expanding our events into cities where we haven’t yet been.

In this blog post, I will reflect on two great events we had in March in Košice, Slovakia, and Osijek, Croatia, and will announce our upcoming meetup in Belgrade on March 28.

Košice

Košice is the second-largest city in Slovakia with 230,000 people. It is indeed a nice city with a preserved historical center. Košice is known as the first settlement in Europe with its own coat of arms.

Košice’s coat of arms.

Let’s dive into our Connect Meetup. The event was held in Tabačka Kulturfabrik, originally a tobacco factory built in the middle of the 19th century and recently transformed into a nice multi-purpose and vibrant venue.

The Infobip Connect meetup took place on March 6, and it was a huge success with a packed house. After short intro from Michal Ganzarcik, Engineering Manager & Site Leader in Infobip Košice office, the first speaker was Róbert Novotný, Developer Advocate at JetBrains. This long time Java enthusiast, now an even bigger Kotlin fan, had an engaging presentation with the title: ‘Development plugins for IntelliJ’.

Attendees enjoying the Košice meetup.

Róbert’s keynote was followed by the presentation of Cyril Sadovsky, Lead AI Engineer at Deutsche Telekom IT Solutions Slovakia. Cyril had a fascinating talk, ‘Building future-proof, safe, robust, scalable and maintainable architecture for AI products based on bleeding-edge research papers’.

After a short break, the next speaker was Dominika Jakubkovic Sedlakova, Product Owner at Ness, Michelin & Advisor at 2Solar, whose topic was ‘Backlog Harmony: Customizing Tools for Every VoiceDescription’. The last speaker was Peter Kal, Senior Software Engineer at Infobip who had a presentation with the title: ‘ Domain Driven Design with Axon’. 

Peter Kal speaking about domain-driven design.

In general, all the presenters had engaging talks with lots of questions from the audience. With this meetup, Košice proved that it has a vibrant dev community and one thing is sure – we’ll be organizing another Infobip Connect meetup there soon.

The Infobip offices in Košice.

Osijek

The second Connect meetup in March was held in Osijek, a beautiful city in the east of Croatia. With a population of around 97.000 people, Osijek is the fourth largest city in Croatia. An interesting fact is that Osijek was the first city in Croatia and in South-East Europe with modern urban transport; in 1884, a horse-drawn tram started to operate in Osijek.

Petra Fribert speaking about LLMs in Osijek.

Now back to our meetup. The event was organized in collaboration with the Osijek Software City association, and it took place in BIOS – Business Incubator on March 19.

After a short intro talk from Dražen Radanović, Senior Engineering Manager & Site Leader at Infobip, our first excellent talk of the meetup about Generative AI Best Practices was delivered by Bernardin Katic, CEO at Insa Investment Software AG. His talk was followed by another great keynote from Petra Fribert, Software Engineer at Infobip. Petra’s keynote was; ‘Demystifying LLMs – how they work and how to make them work better’. 

Attendees paying attention at the Osijek meetup.

Next on the stage was Srdjan Kovacevic, CEO & Co-Founder at Orqa & Nikola Pavesic, Devex & Startup Director at Infobip who moderated a Fireside Chat. Srdjan shared with the audience a story about Orqa, a successful startup from Osijek, and their mission to become the World’s No.1 technology provider for First Person View (FPV) and advanced Remote Reality.

The Osijek meetup was wrapped up by an interesting keynote delivered by Sven Suk, Software Engineer at Infobip. His presentation aimed to emphasize the importance of optimizing bundle size, and to illustrate it through examples. 

Petra Filbert speaking in Osijek.

Like in Košice, the audience in Osijek also enjoyed in great content and interactive talks delivered by wonderful speakers. Another meetup in Osijek is also coming soon for sure. 

Belgrade

The last Infobip Connect meetup for this March will take place in Belgrade. This meetup, dedicated to AI-powered startups, will be organized in partnership with Tenderly & Garaža on March 28. Media partner is Netokracija. All the event details and free RVSP are available on this link.

If you are in Belgrade this Thursday, don’t miss our meetup, where you can expect great talks by AI industry leaders and engaging networking!

Credits

In the end, I have to use this opportunity to thank the colleagues who contributed to the organization of the meetups in Košice and Osijek. Kudos to Michal Ganzarcik, Gabriel Vodicka, Jana Nagyova, and the rest of the Infobip Košice Infobip team and also to Stefani Rabar, Dražen Radanović, and the rest of Osijek Infobip team. Amazing job done!

Stay tuned for the April Connect meetup line-up;  we are coming to Africa and South America. See you in Lagos, Nairobi, Rio de Janeiro & Bogota!