Conference Report #

Basic information #

WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2018 took place in Vienna, Austria, from 16–18 May 2018 at the Austria Center Vienna. The event used the motto “People. Code. Future” and positioned itself as one of the largest developer gatherings in Europe.

According to the conference and multiple reports, the congress hosted around 8,000 participants from ~70 countries, with 150+ speakers across many parallel tracks. The topic range was very broad: web and server-side technologies, AI and machine learning, IoT, security, QA, and more.

Why I went (and expectations) #

I attended because I was motivated by the previous year’s hype and the promise that it would be bigger and better. The lineup looked extremely attractive on paper, especially with keynote-style names like:

• Steve Wozniak (Apple co-founder)
• Joel Spolsky (Stack Overflow / Trello)
• John Romero (id Software / DOOM)
• Joseph Sirosh (Microsoft)
• Angie Jones (Twitter)
• Kaz Sato (Google)
• plus many other well-known engineers and advocates

The marketing and scale suggested a “must attend” European developer event.

Scale, venue, and overall atmosphere #

The most noticeable thing was the sheer size. With thousands of people, a huge venue, and many parallel tracks, the congress felt closer to a convention than a focused tech conference. That had advantages (big-name speakers, lots of themes, lots of people), but it also created a major downside for me:

It felt impersonal.

Instead of a tight community atmosphere, it often felt like moving through a crowd from room to room. Compared to smaller conferences where you repeatedly bump into the same people and have longer conversations, here it was easier to feel “lost in the mass”.

Some attendees also reported organizational friction caused by the scale: crowded rooms, access limitations, and logistics (food lines, room capacity, and last-minute streaming/overflow solutions). Even if you had planned a personal agenda, it wasn’t always guaranteed you would get into your first-choice sessions.

Content and themes: impressive breadth, uneven depth #

The conference covered almost everything trending in 2018:

• AI / Machine Learning
• Security and cybersecurity
• Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)
• Web performance
• Blockchain / crypto
• AR/VR
• Modern CSS and frontend architecture
• developer culture topics (career, burnout, teamwork)

The broad scope is great if your goal is “a bit of everything”. But my personal experience was that many talks stayed at a surface level—more inspirational than practical. That’s not always bad (especially for newcomers), but I personally hoped for more deep technical sessions or “take this home and apply it tomorrow” content.

Highlights that stood out #

Steve Wozniak (keynote / fireside chat) #

Wozniak was clearly used as a headline speaker to attract attendees, and it worked: the room energy was high and it felt like a “main event”. His talk was more reflective than technical—stories about early Apple, views on the future, and strong opinions about social media (including why he dislikes Facebook and the idea that social interaction is being sold to advertisers). Even if you’re not an Apple-focused person, seeing him live is memorable because of the historical perspective.

“Future of the Web” / web performance direction (Ilya Grigorik) #

This was one of the more valuable “engineering perspective” sessions mentioned in reports: how the web evolved, performance as a product feature, the shift from desktop-first to mobile-first/mobile-only, and the growing importance of PWAs, better transport/security defaults (like HTTPS), and even technologies like WebAssembly and Electron.

Security workshops / OWASP-style topics #

Security was a recurring theme (especially early on Day 2 in some reports). Practical security sessions—especially those demonstrating how small mistakes (like poor input handling) lead to major vulnerabilities—tend to be high-impact because they remind you that frameworks do not automatically make you safe.

Joel Spolsky (closing) #

Joel Spolsky closing the conference with a mix of lessons learned (Stack Overflow, developer experience, documentation, community behavior) plus humor/stand-up was a strong finish. This part matched the event’s “developer culture” positioning well: not just code, but how we work and how we treat each other online.

What didn’t work for me #

Even though the speaker list was objectively strong, my personal conclusion was negative overall:

• The huge venue made the event feel unpersonal
• The experience felt more like a mass convention than a “real tech conference”
• Many sessions felt too high-level
• Logistics and crowd management issues (reported by multiple attendees) reduced the feeling of a smooth, premium event

Because of that, this was also the last time I plan to attend.

Conclusion #

WeAreDevelopers 2018 in Vienna succeeded in being big: big names, big crowd, big topics, big ambitions. If your goal is exposure to many trends and the experience of a massive developer gathering, it delivers.

But for me, the event lost its soul at this size. I left with the feeling that the organizers optimized for scale and headline speakers, but that the result was less personal and often less technically deep than what I look for in a conference.

In that sense, it was an important experience—mainly because it helped me understand what kind of conferences I don’t benefit from: extremely large events where networking and learning become difficult simply due to scale.