Christian Heilmann

So I went to “We are developers” in Vienna…

Thursday, May 31st, 2018 at 1:20 pm

A few days ago, I went to the We are developers congress in Vienna, Austria. The “Woodstock for developers” actually turned out to be a very well organized, but less wild event full of pretty amazing presenters and content. It was a developer conference, not as focused about all kind of web matters, but more holistically about development. Hence a lot of the topic revolved around DevOps, high level languages, Artificial Intelligence and Cloud matters.

Starting my presentation

My personal contributions were:

A two hour “workshop” on building intelligent, human interfaces using machine learning systems. You can look up the notes and links of this workshop. For bonus points, I got confused about the date of this workshop. As I just returned from Seattle there was a time-difference confusion and I arrived an hour before the workshop. I hadn’t slept for 30 hours and arrived 20 minutes late for it. However, people seemed to have enjoyed it and I got good feedback.

On the second day I gave one of the opening talks (“Killing the golden calf of coding”) and it was incredibly scary to be on a huge stage like that, were earlier Steve Wozniak worked his magic. The slides of the talk are on SlideShare:

Killing the golden calf of coding – We are Developers keynote from Christian Heilmann

Feedback was phenomenal:

I also took part in an Artificial Intelligence panel talking about the ethics and boundaries of AI.

On the third day I was the MC on the main stage, introducing and running the Q&A for Bitcoin expert Andreas Antonopulous, Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas, Google Angular expert Stephen Fluin, Futurist Martin Wezowski, Google iOS security expert Felix Krause, styled components inventor Max Stoiber and Stackoverflow/Fog Creek founder Joel Spolsky.

All in all, it was a very well organized event and it was great to meet some of my heroes (John and Brenda Romero of Wolfenstein/Doom fame) and many new ones.

I want to thank the organisers for having me and trusting me with so many things. I’m only sorry that I was pretty much shattered all the way as I had just come back from a few daunting days in Seattle the day before. I will come back to the event, as it is exciting and different at the same time.

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160: Graphs and RAGs explained and VS Code extension hacks Graphs and RAG explained, how AI is reshaping UI and work, how to efficiently use Cursor, VS Code extensions security issues.
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157: CUDA in Python, Gemini Code Assist and back-dooring LLMs We met with a CUDA expert from NVIDIA about the future of hardware, we look at how AI fails and how to play pong on 140 browser tabs.
156: Enterprise dead, all about Bluesky and React moves on! Learn about Bluesky as a platform, how to build a React App and how to speed up SQL. And play an impossible game in the browser.

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