Developer Walk – A Great Idea Put Into Practice

Three weeks ago the (probably) first official Developer Walk took place in Dresden, the lovely capital of Saxony in Germany – an event that should and will be repeated.

As I wrote recently, I am not the guy you're likely to meet at a commercial tech conference. And even going to community conferences has become something like a class reunion to me, as there's always a core of people I am happy to meet and drink some beer with at those events.

So a couple of years ago an idea was born at one of those events, or more precisely while hanging around in a bar afterwards: Why shouldn't we meet without an official reason? Simply walking somewhere, talking about tech and less important stuff, and having some fun together.

In June Sebastian announced it officially at his blog (in German), so we only needed a place and a date to make it happen. Unfortunately none of us had time over the summer, so Sebastian set up a Trello board, which – promoted via Twitter – quickly became the central place for some discussions and decision-making.

We didn't know how many people would make it, because Dresden, located in East Germany only 100 km from Poland, meant to be some long journeys, but eventually we had 13 attendees. Which was great when recalling the self-organizing character of that event.

We met in the morning at the Elbe river, took an original steamboat from the 1920's to a little city called Rathen and then climbed up the "Bastei", a beautiful and world-famous place with a tremendous view you may probably know from one of the Windows 7 wallpapers. Altogether more than 9 hours of geek-talk, good food, and even some "sports". And of course it did end at the hotel bar ;-).

I think we were all part of the proof of concept of a new community format which will be repeated for sure in 2016. See you there.