The hungarian based tech conference was waiting for its attendees with exciting talks from top-notch speakers coming from all over the world, with Dj and fun evening activities. It is not a hidden purpose of one of the most popular technological and software developer festivals in the region to create a platform and a community where people can learn about a wide range of topics and questions concerning the IT world. The numbers speak for themselves: as a result of the pandemic, this year, the conference was held online but despite all these difficulties more than 1000 experts joined the conference from 34 countries. Nonetheless we can be proud of the national gray matter as the Hungarian developers made a huge success at CraftHack which is a companion event of Craft Conference.

Craft Conference in the past seven years grew into one of the most significant conferences in central Europe dealing with topics in technology and software development. Not only do people come from Hungary or other parts of Europe but programmers come from the United States and other continents as well. This year Craft was held online between 27 May and June 4 with more than 100 participants and this time, one fifth of the attendees were women. Craft was organised by CraftHub, the spin-off of Prezi and IBM Budapest Lab, with the sole purpose of creating a place for developers where they can share their experience with the possibility of learning from world-class speakers about the newest trends in the field. The line-up only proved its true purpose with experts coming from the biggest companies such as Microsoft, Ebay and Google. The virtual conference was hosted in the beautiful, brand-new headquarter office of evosoft, the diamond sponsor of Craft Conference in 2021.

’Because of the uncertain situation caused by COVID, this year we could only organise Craft online, but the expected high level of standard and atmosphere remained the same that our participants had already experienced in previous years. Most of our attendees were software developers or engineers as usual, but there were many business analysts, product owners and leaders who are mainly working in the field of technology. That is why when we were thinking about the themes of the conference our main focus was to have an event where everybody can find topics that intrigues them and can get inspired by. According to this idea our line-up was built up from not only experts coding on a daily basis but coaches and start-up gurus who shared their personal experiences with the audience.’– told Médea, one of the founders of CraftHub.

For coders not only about coding- there’s so much more to this field

Despite the fact that the conference offers practical tips to the developers, Craft Conference’s strength lies in the fact that besides many IT related questions, they put the focus on topics that might help participants to benefit them in business development or innovation. During the presentations the talk of Amazon about serverless technologies and sustainability perfectly balanced the talk of Joseph Pelrine who is also known as the „CTO whisperer” who was giving a talk on how to build high-performing developer teams. During the 3 days Hungarian experts also performed such as Ákos Kapui from Shapr3D who was helping startupers answering the question why productivity declines in fast-growing organizations as a result of transitional processes and decision-making practises and how to change that.

It didn’t come as a surprise that a lot of the speakers had talked about and reflected on the past one year and how the corona virus affected the business life that became even more uncertain and unpredictable. Fortunately, the experts also gave us numerous tips and practical advice on the new emerging challenges. As a result many presentations consisted of the notion of agile , the agile thinking and its importance in the everyday life of the organisations. Marvellous initiations were also introduced such as WeThinkCode, whose main purpose is to train a globally competitive software developer generation on the African continent.

Hungarian software developers also succeeded in CraftHack

This year, for the first time the conference was also accompanied by a hackathon that really moved software developers where there were more than 200 participants in the end. Although teams registered from all over the world (Canada, Dania and Malaysia) to take part in the hackathon, the Hungarian teams made huge success in three of the tracks. Moreover a Hungarian team won the main prize of the jury and also the community award. An internal communication application was created by Blink for the future workplaces that helps the building of the community, and a flexible, welcoming enterprise culture. The idea was also acknowledged by one of the incubation partners of CraftHack and the team HYPER was also among the ones whose work amazed the jury. The participant coded together 10 000 euros during the tracks in the end. 

‘What we love about Craft Conference is that it perfectly disproves every stereotype that is connected to software engineers. The chat rooms are full with ‘loner coders’ who can not wait to ask their professional questions or share their ideas after each talk and we can also say that the participants are keen on using the networking function in the online platform as well. Also a popular function was the conference expo where the sponsors of Craft were waiting for the participants in their virtual booths with exciting games and prizes besides many career opportunities. Contrary to the common beliefs developers love having professional conversations, and because they are highly professional they are perfectly aware of the fact that the secret of success is the continuous learning. That is what we are trying to help here at Craft.’ added Médea Baccifava.