WeAreDevelopers: Sir Tim Berners-Lee gives keynote speech at WAD World Congress Berlin
The WeAreDevelopers World Congress will take place again this summer in Berlin: From July 27th to 28th, 2023, the developer community will meet with industry leaders and decision-makers from the tech scene. This time the motto of the conference at the City Cube exhibition center is “Shaping the Future. Together.” As in the previous year, the organizers are expecting more than 10,000 developers and numerous executives from the tech industry and have planned additional space due to the recent strong demand – the event was fully booked in 2022. Now more than 6,000 square meters of exhibition space and 12 stages are planned, the organizers are expecting more than 300 speakers and numerous exhibitors.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee has agreed to be a top-class keynoter. According to TIME Magazine, Berners-Lee is one of the “one hundred most important people of the 20th century”. The British physicist co-founded the Internet era with HTML and HTTP as well as the world’s first web browser. In doing so, Berners-Lee paved the way for a technical disruption that still shapes our everyday lives today. Very few can imagine a world without the Internet.
exchange for the community
“Since I’m a developer myself, I know how important the exchange via platforms like WeAreDevelopers is for the community. Developers are passionate about their work, the code and want to push new ideas,” says Sead Ahmetovic about Berners-Lee and the other speakers and conference guests. Ahmetovic is CEO of the IT job platform WeAreDevelopers, which is the organizer behind the major event. According to him, large and small technology companies use the conference for announcements. Last year, Microsoft announced the end of Internet Explorer at the WAD Congress, and GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke presented a first demo of the GitHub Copilot programming assistant live on stage. According to the organizers, this year’s edition also promises some surprises.
C++ inventor Bjarne Stroustrup and game developer John Romero first met at WAD World Congress 2022.
(Image: Silke Hahn)
The aim of the conference is to bring the younger developer community into contact with the founding fathers and mothers of their area: last year, for example, the inventor of C++ Bjarne Stroustrup and the computer game developer John Romero (DOOM, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D) were guests. In the past, the line-up has featured the likes of Apple’s Steve Wozniak, Microsoft’s corporate vice president Amanda Silver, Google’s statistician and chief decision scientist Cassie Kozyrkov, and world chess champion Gary Kasparov.
The WeAreDevelopers World Congress opens up numerous opportunities to find out about current topics from the technology world and to network with like-minded people. The main focus areas include the latest trends in machine learning and artificial intelligence, modern software development and architecture, testing, security, web development, cloud, gaming, as well as soft skills and contemporary forms of collaboration.
Conference party at Kraftwerk Berlin with DJ Tiësto
Software development shapes the future
Overall, the line-up of the conference was impressive and brought together some big names in software development. In addition to those already mentioned, there were also Håkon Wium Lie (inventor of CSS), Miško Hevery (inventor of Angular and AngularJS), Douglas Crockford (inventor of JSON and one of the developers of JavaScript) and other celebrities such as the lead developer of Microsoft Torsten Stiller and the CTO of Stripe David Singleton represented with lectures.
“We have once again made Berlin the capital of tech innovations and modern software development. In addition, we were able to show how developers shape the future of our society,” says Sead Ahmetovic, CEO and founder of WeAreDevelopers, about the success of his and his team. The commitment with which tech experts shared their knowledge and insights with the community impressed him again. “The WeAreDevelopers World Congress provided important impetus and we were able to show how software development shapes our society. A success across the board,” Ahmetovic summed up the previous year.
View of the main stage at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2022
(Image: WeAreDevelopers)
2022: Space flights via hackathon and rave at the power plant
According to Rudi Bauer, CCO of WeAreDevelopers, the World Congress bridges a gap between companies and developers. In the previous year, more than 100 companies participated as partners, and quite a few such as Accenture, AWS, Dynatrace, IBM, Microsoft, Stripe, Tezos and Volkswagen were also represented in the Expo area and could be contacted by the participants. Among other things, the conference featured Rapyd’s “Hack the Galaxy” betting programming, where developers could win one of three space flights (or a $130,000 cash prize), and in the closing keynote, Microsoft bid farewell to the Internet Explorers. The conference party in the Berlin power plant featured Tiësto, a world-class DJ whose beats made the conference motto physically tangible for the guests: “We are back!”
DJ Tiësto provided the right beats for the aftershow of the developer conference in 2022.
(Image: WeAreDevelopers)
The organizers have not yet announced what accompanying program is planned for this year. The entire program is currently under construction. Information on the status of planning can be found on the conference website. There is also a retrospective of the previous year for everyone who was there or who wants to get an impression for the first time.
Heise Medien has been involved in the organizer WeAreDevelopers since 2019.
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