msvrtan's blog

Short intro to WebCamp Zagreb 2012

WebCamp in Zagreb

In less then 20 days, Zagreb will have first web developer conference organized by mutliple web developer groups:

- Code@six - Ruby and new cutting edge tech meetup group
- FlashHr - Flex/Flash user group
- Future DEV - Microsoft user group
- HUJAK - Croatian Java user group
- Python Croatia
- ZgPHP

Since most of this groups are to small to have their own web conference we all decided to organize it together. Really Python, Ruby & PHP on one side and Microsoft & Java on the other side? Are we crazy? Is this voodoo? :)

Well actually all of these groups have much more in common then people would think at first glance. Don't forget that programming language is only a tool to get things done and actually we can learn a lot from each other. We all share a lot of common things like deployment or unit testing, work in same environments (small or big companies aside), use same types of databases and so on.

Alhough this idea was floating around for some time, we all decided to go with it in late September. Yes we decided to organize it all in exactly 2 months. It seemed like pushing it, but we decided who will do what and started. On October 2 we announced conference with only a short description and when we rolled out first 100 tickets on 11th (together with call for papers) they were "grabbed" in less then 7 hours. Next batch of tickets was only for group members and they went off the shelves pretty quickly too. At that moment we were sure that Zagreb needed an event like this.

Since conference is planned on Saturday and our venue can have only 2 tracks, we had 24 slots to fill up so each group contacted their members to find most interesting speakers. This resulted in more then 60 papers, we had to find the best ones and are really sorry that all of them will not be presented. Speakers are coming from all kinds of backgrounds and technologies, we even got few speakers from region which is great. Whole agenda will be published tomorrow (Monday) on Webcamp site .

We got 6 sponsors lined up, from small tech companies like Dobar kod, Revolucija, Netgen and Trikoder to tech giants like Microsoft and Adobe! We are looking for few more sponsors to finance pizzas and beverages so if you are interested in supporting this kind of event contact WebCamp organizers by email: sponzori (at) webcampzg.org .

If you are interested in coming, tickets for the event are free of charge (yes free) and next batch will be available on Tuesday. We expect they will go pretty quickly so look for WebCamp announcement on Monday when exact time of tickets sale will be published.