So you want to start a developer conference?

The story of WhatTheStack from the PoV of a co-founder. A candid retelling of all things good, bad and ugly - and ultimately, why it's totally worth it.

About eight months ago, myself together with a couple of people from my dev education organization, DeveD and a local hackerspace had the call. The first official one, for what was to become WhatTheStack. You know, the kind where crazy ideas are born? Well, this one can be described as: it’s about time we had a dev-focused conference in our corner of the world. Not that there weren’t any, mind you - we wanted something bigger. Something that would be up to par with the conferences we frequent during the year. Thus, the idea of WhatTheStack was born.

It’s funny how things work out sometimes. This particular meeting and idea for a conference was built on the “bones” of another, previous conference. But let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

Sometime in late ‘23 (I think it was November), team DeveD had a call with a local branch of a very famous international tech education/inclusion org. They were already running a UI/UX meetup, aiming for it to become something bigger - ideally a conference. We’ve collaborated with them on a bunch of projects before and had a pretty good experience overall, so we thought - why not? We weren’t into UI/UX that much ourselves, but we’ve done plenty of tech events before.

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