After a two-year pause, WeAreDevelopers conference opened its doors in Berlin. We were honoured and privileged to attend this event representing our company Valens, which has decided to have its developers be a part of this global summit that hosted more than 8000 developers from all around the world together with 250 presenters. As you could expect, the first day of the conference started with long lines of people waiting for check-in. When we consider how sought the tickets were and how long the lines were, the check-in process went quite smooth due to the excellent organisation of the conference. Four of us representing Valens, Amin, Haris, Amer, and Josip split into groups so we could gather more knowledge and increase the reach of our networking.

Amer and Amin went after the presentations and workshops that cover news and introductions to new blockchain technologies, companies doing them and new exciting projects in the blockchain world. The first presentation they attended was "A developer's journey through web3: separating hype from substance" where the presenter was Arthur Breitman co-founder of Tezos. After the first attended presentation, we were trying to attend as much as we could in order to cover as many frontend technologies including web3 as well. That way in the following day and a half we had an opportunity to hear about new trends and insights about where the technology is moving to.

Some of the talks we attended:
- To New Frontiers: The Future of Frontend Development by Rainer Hahnekamp
- Yes, You Need to Unit Test your JavaScript. Here's How. by James Bender
- Extending HTML with Web Components by Rowdy Rabouw
- Web development: where are we, and where are we going? by Laurie Voss
- Solve the “But it works on my machine!” problem with cloud-based development environments by Toma Puljak

Josip, the backend developer, not surprisingly was interested in backend technologies and DevOps trends. What was confirmed through his experience is that the cloud is not the future standard but that future is already here, and all of those who are not on that train are trying to hop on it. What is interesting is that there is a new player in the cloud market, STACKIT, a subsidiary of the group Schwarz. As we expect it is not on the level of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Alibaba Cloud, but regardless STACKIT has a great opportunity to set itself as a leading European cloud provider. Certainly what helps their cause is the immense funding and capital of the Schwarz group as well as much experience they are getting just from supporting the Schwarz's cloud needs.

Worth mentioning is also the big presence of fintech companies, as well as their dominance in attracting capital into their projects. We can conclude that the exchange of money through various tech services is opening doors and creating new opportunities for many companies and individuals. The two biggest fintech services that were present were Stripe and Rapyd. Fun fact about Rapyd, they organized a lottery where the winner gets a trip to outer space scheduled to happen in 2025.

The most interesting presentation that Josip attended was The Snowball Effect of Open Source held by Armin Ronacher, inventor of Flask, and an overall huge contributor to the Open Source community. The presentation was full of content and useful tips when working in open source. Most importantly he talked extensively about the taboo topic in open source and that is monetization.

Our colleague Haris also attended mostly presentations that were focused on frontend development as he is a frontend developer himself. Haris attended these presentations and these are his takeaways.

Building reusable server components in react 18, Addison Schultz presenter
This workshop was about the newest version of React, and about Miro web app made for maintaining and organizing team retrospectives and other types of meetings. Miro is a great collaboration tool allowing collaborative voting, note adding, and things of such nature. We were connecting React frontend app together with Miro API and applying server-side rendering.

Is Flutter ready for the web yet? - A live coding comparison between Flutter and React, Marcus Wojtusik and Thomas Hinterwimmer presenters
This webinar was an excellent example of how advanced React is compared to other frameworks that are still in the early stages of development from perspectives of speed, performance, SEO, security, and applying the latest best practices. In every aspect that was covered by the presenters React was shown as the best tool but still is not removing the need and worthiness of Flutter apps.

How to make your automated testing suck less? Julia Reinhold presenter
One of the most interesting workshops Haris attended. Julia held a great presentation of her team of QA/ Frontend engineers and the tests they use the most in the frontend app (unit, integration, regression + visual, end-to-end). Haris had an opportunity to get answers on why and how these are used.

Writing a full-text search engine in TypeScript Michele Riva
In this presentation, it was shown to us how to reduce the number of iterations and how to write the fastest algorithm for searching text with typescript.

Extending HTML with Web Components, Rowdy Rabouw
Developer with 25 years of experience Rowdy showed the attendees how to write custom elements and how to extend the functionality that are needed to us with plain Javascript without the addition of any framework. Also what Haris heard here for the first time is the writing of event listeners that trigger on the modification of some attribute. Worth mentioning is that modern applications are usually written using javascript frameworks like React, Angular, Vue, Svelte, etc. so the writing of custom elements or events on attribute change has a different flow.

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