I was thrilled to get another opportunity to speak at Build Stuff, a fantastic conference held in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital city which I have always loved visiting.

Build Stuff is a conference tailored for development teams of all sorts, including coders, team leaders, software architects, and product managers. The event aims to uplift the dev community by offering up-to-date information and honing the necessary skills to stay ahead in an ever-evolving tech world. As someone who attended this conference twice as a speaker, I can vouch for the effectiveness and the energy of the conference, which is really amazing!

In this blog, I review the conference experience but also present some key points of the talks I attended and consider worth sharing.

Conference overview from a speaker’s perspective

Seeing this event from a speaker’s angle, Build Stuff is a massive and well-organized event that has something for absolutely everyone. I am amazed by how accessible it is with many various talks! Over three days, the event includes five stages for talks, two for hands-on workshops, plus a cool expo space where you can pick up some neat swag and stickers.

As for us speakers, we were treated to a fantastic speaker dinner at an amazing location with a traditional Lithuanian meal, complete with local music and dance by an ethnic dancing troupe — a lot of us speakers even joined in with the dancing, which was sooooooo funny, interesting, and amazing!!! The afterparty the next day was another highlight, with performances by Dylan Beattie and the Linebreakers who are always amazing and have funny covers of the songs, followed by Great Things — a band made up of only software engineers and leads! It was a truly great evening with awesome company, but I had to call it an early night to finish preparing for my talk the next day.

One of the best parts of this event is how easy it is to network with people and make new friends. Kudos to the organizers who really knocked it out of the park with their warm and friendly conference and all the activities.

My talk

I debuted my talk from Build Stuff earlier this year at an ADPList meetup, and I’m so pleased with how an upgraded version turned out! Even though I had to skip a few slides due to last-minute tweaks, I think I managed to pass the main message and what I wanted to achieve with my session. I’ve laid a solid foundation for this talk that I can build on to take it to the next level in future iterations and conferences.

This year’s talk was a bit different — I zoomed in on the behind-the-scenes concepts that can slip under the radar when trying to make our apps global. I aimed to connect the dots between different roles like developers, product managers, designers, QA, and more. I did this by bringing up issues they might not be aware of using a mix of untypical and engaging examples, like the different meanings of hand gestures or emojis in various cultures.

The attendees in the audience were truly fantastic — they were so involved and engaged, and that totally made a difference! I’m excited to keep this momentum going and hopefully lay an even stronger basis with audiences for 2024.

What about the talks I have visited?

The speaker line-up was already impressive – I met a lot of new speakers, caught up with the old speaker friends I knew from before, and made a lot of friends. The lineup was so good that at some slots, I wanted to attend 3 or 4 talks simultaneously!

Because I had my talk on Friday (and I was behind with the preparation due to an overwhelming workload at the office over the past few weeks 😅), I didn’t have time to attend the conference talks as much as I wanted, but I did manage to catch a few very interesting ones!

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam: Spearheading the future of programming

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, who’s an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, and a professor, gave the opening keynote. His talk took us on a journey through the history of programming and gave a glimpse into its future. Here are some key takeaways from this talk:

• Learning new concepts gets easier as you have been exposed to more diverse ideas.
• Dive into various languages. It’s not about using them all but about being able to quickly adapt to changes.
• Don’t just prepare for the future — it’s already here, so embrace it!

Lirone Glikman: Networking Unleashed: Power Up Your Conference Experience and Forge Lasting Connections!

Lirone’s presentation was one of my favorite ones. She talked about the essential and crucial part of any conference, networking. For many, networking can be hard because they’re not sure how to go about it. Lirone shared some really insightful tips and live examples on how to do it right and how to connect. She’s also a really fantastic person — one of the best I have befriended this year at Build Stuff!

A few highlights from her talk:

• People often dislike networking because they don’t know where to start. We’re not always taught how to network.
• Have a clear aim for networking, know who you want to meet and what you hope to get from it.
• Start conversations, introduce yourself, and make genuine connections with others.
• Build lasting relationships. People remember and value them. Try to make sure to follow up on connections!
• Snap a selfie to create a fun memory!
• Foster professional connections that last.

If you’re looking to expand your circle and connect with others, Lirone’s session is a must-watch. Thanks to her session, I also made a few extra connections, which was really great!

Cassandra Faris: Failing Successfully

Cassandra is one of my favorite speaker friends, and I was excited to see her speaking at Build Stuff again! Her talks are always insightful, and this time, she shared an experiential story that had a strong impact on me — stories have such a powerful impact.

Some of my favorite points from the talk:

• It’s normal to fail and to need a hand sometimes.
• To get through tough spots, we’ve got to accept being vulnerable which isn’t the same as being weak.
• Pull from the SCRUM playbook to tackle failure. Keep an eye on progress, move forward in small steps, be completely open, keep getting better, and take time to reflect on what went well, what didn’t, and what new things to try.
• Embrace that you’re not perfect; you’ll mess up, and that’s totally fine. Allow yourself room to make those errors.
• Remind yourself daily that you’re doing your best.
• Understand that failure is a part of life and it’s completely okay.

Max Gfeller: Progressively Enhancing Web Apps with LLMs

Max Gfeller is one of my closest speaker friends and a fantastic speaker. His talk was packed with interesting insights on how to harness the power of OpenAI’s API to supercharge Web apps and give them an extra kick. He painted an exciting picture of a future of Web development supercharged by AI. Keep an eye out for the recording of his talk – it’s really worth your time if you want to see how AI can revolutionize any of your projects.

Keith Mitchell: Decoding Burnout: A Holistic Approach

Keith Mitchell closed out the first day of the conference with an important keynote on burnout and how to approach it. He used to play pro NFL football and now he’s a renowned yoga and mindfulness teacher. His talk gave straightforward tips on spotting burnout and how to avoid it. It’s really valuable and amazing to see conferences bringing attention to mental health because it’s so important for our well-being and keeping a healthy work-life balance.

One piece of advice from Keith’s talk that really stuck with me is that we have to work at being happy. If we want it, we must put in the effort, look after it, and help it grow.

Kevlin Henney: Architecture as Knowledge

Kevlin Henney is an expert speaker who really knows his stuff and always delivers great talks. They are full of useful info that you can put to use right away. Definitely check out his sessions if you can. He’s got a lot of experience and advice to share! I listened to one part of his session where he shared a lot of useful information about ADRs and how to make architectural decisions, so it is on my to-do list!

Tejas Kumar: New Trends in Front-End Development (and what we can learn from them)

Tejas is a person about whom absolutely everybody says, “You just have to meet him!”. After hanging out with him at Infobip Shift and Build Stuff, I completely agree — he’s really great! We were both happy we didn’t have talks scheduled again at the same time. 🙂 In his session, Tejas broke down his talk into three parts, and I got a sneak peek when we spent time together during the Build Stuff appetizer two nights earlier. His presentation was about improving front-end work, especially as we often load too much JavaScript. He made a vital point that we must clearly understand what we should do versus what machines should do in development. He covered optimizing frontend performance, compared how reactivity and re-rendering work in React versus SolidJS, and suggested that the frontend should ideally be unnoticeable. It was a talk full of valuable insights that I recommend everyone to check out!

Angeliki Patsiavou: Silence of the technical lambs: When you don’t speak up for user experience

Angeliki Patsiavou, or Angie, as we call her, is one of the best people I met at Build Stuff this year. She’s really fantastic and great to hang out with! Her talk had a title that immediately drew me in (personally my favorite title this year), and the content lived up to that first impression. Angie used relatable examples to make her points about UX/UI, which is so effective because it helps the audience connect with the material. She used the Avengers as a fun example to show what can happen when users’ needs aren’t considered and how things can quickly go awry. It was a very informative talk that can teach you a lot about considering user needs. One key takeaway from her talk that I find very powerful was: Do everything to make your designs user-focused to really empower people using your products.

Nico Martin: Rethinking desktop applications with progressive web apps

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to listen to Nico’s session fully, but what I heard in the session was very good, and I definitely plan to check it out! On top of that, it’s always nice to meet and befriend great people in the industry like Nico.

Heather Downing: Imposter Syndrome: Overcoming Self-Doubt in Success

Heather’s session on Imposter Syndrome was another attention-grabber. I met her last year and caught up with her again at the conference this year. She dives into a topic that I think everyone should learn more about. Some key points that really stuck with me include:

• Turn curiosity into confidence and reframe fear as excitement. Knowing your gaps in knowledge is beneficial.
• Look for a mentor in your area of interest and be willing to learn. Admitting what you don’t know openly is okay as long as you’re willing to find out and act upon it.
• Don’t measure your progress against others.
• Just because you fail at something doesn’t mean you’re a failure.
• Fear not finding out the truth more than you fear failing.

Unfortunately, I didn’t fully attend her session, but it is on my to-do list!

Dylan Beattie: From Hot Metal to HTML: The Story of Type

Dylan gave the closing keynote on the history of type and typography, which absolutely blew me away. It was fascinating! He revealed things I had never known, like how ASCII codes’ binary values are used to create font characters on a screen. A truly excellent and exciting session by Dylan, as always!

Other talks

There were many other sessions I wished I could have attended, especially on Friday, so like many of you, I’m eagerly waiting for the recordings to be released. I suggest you all keep an eye out for those. They’re surely going to be worth watching!

I have added links to this year’s talks that are already posted on YouTube, but check out the Build Stuff YouTube channel for more talks as they are currently in the process of adding them.

Overall

I’m thrilled that I was able to attend Build Stuff as a speaker again this year, and I’m walking away feeling pretty successful. I got to connect with loads of speakers and participants, and I’m excited about the new connections I’ve made. My talk went well as well. I see it as a big step up from the already decent one I gave last year. Here’s to hoping I can join you all again at Build Stuff next year!