October 2016

Last year I was at Voxxed Thessaloniki as an attendee and I was thoroughly impressed by many aspects of it but one thing that I really felt and had a huge impact on me was it’s main message of ‘BY DEVELOPERS, FOR DEVELOPERS’. Sometimes motos are used for marketing purposes and have no correlation with the values of an event but that wasn’t the case for this.

The Thessaloniki development industry conundrum

Let me take a step back and discuss a phenomenon we experience here in Thessaloniki, at least from my point of view. I believe we have a lot of talented developers that are eager to have succesful and impactful careers. I believe the above to be true because Thessaloniki is not a small city (1mil+ population) and has many and large educational institutions and by my own experience and personal interaction with other members of the development community. On the other hand, our development industry is anemic, offering few and low quality opportunities for developers to do impactful work and make progress in their careers.

Why this disparity exists is something I have found difficult to reason about and goes beyond the scope of this post.

The vision

So for a long time I had been thinking that it is not a solution to just compain and simply try to accept this situation. As developers we need to take matters into our own hands and attempt to improve our professional situation, careers, knowledge etc. And in turn we might be able to also help lift our local industry. How can we achieve that? By taking part, supporting and driving forward the local development communities and impactful events.

How Voxxed fits with the above vision?

Having a world class developer conference in our city can be claimed to lift our industry just by itself. But also being a conference that is driven and being very close to the local developer communities? That is amazing! So I strongly felt that helping out could potentialy be my small contribution towards the above vision. So I meakly contacted Patroklos with my desire to join and before really realizing it, I was in! Thanks Patrokle!

Should you attend?

This is a question only each of us can answer for himself.

What I can tell you to have in mind when you ponder on that question is that this event is organized by a team of very passionate people. They are passionate and care about their craft, the developer community and our industry.

Hope to see your there!