tl;dr: The WeAreDevelopers conference was a mess.

• Helplessly overbooked.
• Bad air.
• Low quality sessions.
• Bad WIFI.

I have to say I had really been looking forward to this conference hoping it would turn out to be a great event hosted here in Austria, connecting developers and providing information about technology. Well, let's just say things turned out ... differently.

Frankly, this was the worst conference I have ever been to so far. I originally planned to do a blog post on each of the two conference days, summarizing the talks I attended and things I learnt, like I usually do). But I won't do that this time due to the lack of good sessions I was able to watch. Instead I will just use this blog post as an outlet for my frustration and give you a bit of a rant here.

What bothered me (and many, many other) most was how overbooked this conference was. These are the capacities for the session rooms (stages) as taken from the official conference website:

• Main Stage: approx. 1,500
• Yellow Stage: approx. 300
• Green Stage: approx. 300

That adds up to approximately 2100 seats. Interestingly, the organizers were boasting during the keynote speech having 3500+ attendees. So WTF!? Also having one (!) coffee station and a single toilet for these amount of people is almost ridiculous.

The logical consequence of putting too many people into a confined space is that the air gets really bad. But whoever thought that putting food trucks into that very same confined space would be a good idea, clearly did not think things through.

Of course, the WIFI sucked - but you already expected that right?

All those things were highly annoying, but one could maybe ignore them if at least the technical content had been good. But unfortunately that was not the case and most of the sessions were really low quality. Also the crowded rooms did not really help there.

The whole conference felt like a quantity over quality thing which is never a good idea. So, unless things promise to improve significantly, I'll pass this one next year.

I'll leave you with a couple of comments people left on the message board of the official conference app that I found quite entertaining ....