On Thursday last week I gave a tech talk titled "Embracing Ephemeral Environments" at bit summit in Hamburg. The room was packed, many people even came up to me with questions afterwards.
This was the third time speaking at a conference for me and of course that experience helped tremendously, I am not nearly as nervous anymore as I was the first time I had to go on stage. I even had a few tech issues just minutes before the talk (the price of running Linux, I guess - switched to a co-workers mac as you can see in the image) but even with that, after the first few sentences are out you just get into the zone.
Super thankful for everyone who came up to me afterwards because they wanted to know even more and for all the positive feedback I received. I do think this was my best tech talk yet and I hope I can give it again at some point.
Finally a conference focused on tech
I really do think it's the most genuine tech conference I've been at so far due to it's hyper focus on tech and building things. There are no vendor booths and they are strictly filtering out any talk that promotes closed source products.
This message was repeated by the organizers over and over again. I think events like this are exactly what Hamburg needs to become more attractive to tech companies and workers alike and I hope we are going to see more of it.
Room for improvement
While I enjoyed the conference very much it's all also fair to point out a few things that could have gone better.
On one of the tracks called "Data & Observability" you could hear the speaker from the "AI Engineering in Practice" stage (that one had a bigger stage and was generally louder). That made talks on the Data track a bit less attractive and I ended up primarily choosing talks on other tracks because of it. The problem was that the venue had no separate rooms, it was only curtains separating one talk from another.
The topic of AI felt really forced into some of the talks, I know you are using agents in your development workflow, everyone does at this point. 6 years ago you wouldn't have mentioned which IDE you used to write the code. If you want to talk about AI workflows then by all means do so but don't force it into a talk about a completely separate topic.
Closing words
I am looking forward to many more years of bit summit in Hamburg and I hope it can inspire the overall tech scene in this beautiful city to grow. I am sure the organizers will take their lessons learned form this year and come back with an even better event next time and I cannot thank them enough for trying to turn Hamburg into more of a tech hub.