I’m a very lucky person, I’ve been invited to speak in the capital city of the home of Dracula, yes you guessed it! I was invited to give a talk at the 6^th edition of DevTalks in Cluj, Transylvania. I’ve spoken at the event a couple of times before, but for some reason, I just haven’t gone for the last few years.

DevTalks is one of the premier generalist developer events in Romania, with an amazing lineup of 31 speakers over three tracks on a single day, and some fantastic sponsors.

What did I get to see?

Well, I’ll admit I missed the first few talks as I was preparing for my talk at 12:20, so I can’t give a report on the morning. What I can talk about is the sponsors. They had great sponsors, like Google, Revolut, and Siemens (as well as quite a few others). They had some interesting demos, some had amazing snacks like gelato, and the swag was super cool, which was a shame as I couldn’t grab any because I didn’t take a big enough bag. 😔

What about the talks?

I really hope everyone enjoyed my talk. The data says I did with 44 out of 51 people saying it was good during the talk (it had a live poll via WhatsApp). But once the lunch was over, I got to enjoy some really interesting talks.

So, starting with mine. I believe we set the mood of the morning with the amazing MC for the Programming Stage Mike Dolha (you can guess the jokes that were used).

The first talk after the lunch break I went to see was Damjan Obal talking about UX of Data (2023 Edition). This was a really good dive into how the usability of data and the quality of it are important. He also used a lot of Star Trek memes around Data, which gave me a big grin.

My final talk of the day was delivered by Nick Ciolpan, titled Revisiting Foundations: Rediscovering Craftsmanship with DCI. I’d never heard of DCI before, and he gave an entertaining run-through of how DCI was the evolution of MVC to describe discreet objects. Even covering how languages have evolved around the principle.

Did you forget anything?

Well, yes I did, I can’t forget to mention that the food trucks and easily accessible coffee (very important for me) were excellent. Overall, the event had a lot of amazing stuff going for it, and I would highly recommend it from both speaking and attending points of view! The next year’s event will happen on 29-30 May, 2024.

When the event is on in either Bucharest or Cluj next year, or you can go to the sister event, DevCon on Nov 1-2^nd in Bucharest, you should try to attend if you can. You’ll have a blast.