I always enjoy coming down to Brazil for their annual Embarcadero Developer Conference. Unfortunately travel restrictions moved the event virtual for the last couple years, but it was back to an in person event this year. Previous in person events had around 400 attendees, but this year had around 600 attendees. Even though they moved to a new venue, it was pretty close to capacity!
Joining me this year was Stephen Ball. We both gave the product address together. Everyone was very excited about 11.2 Alexandria and everything else covered at the conference. Stephen has a blog post with his point of view for his first trip to Brazil.
Besides the greater number of attendees this year, there was a noticeably greater diversity in age and gender, with many more women and younger developers. There were a few developers brand new to Delphi, that took time to talk with me and ask some questions. They were all very excited with everything they were learning and all the possibilities opening up to them.
I met up with Lucas Belo from Python4Delphi and Paulo César Botelho Barbosa and his brother Vinícius Felipe Botelho Barbosa from Skia4Delphi. Lucas and Paulo were speaking at the conference for the first time and I heard great feedback on their sessions. Especially among the newer developers there was a lot of excitement for these projects. Paulo received a nice metal spartan helmet in honor of their Spirt of Delphi Ward from 2021.
It was great seeing all the MVPs, Tech Partners, and other exhibitors. I’ll post some more pictures later. Unit-TMR had a really fascinating technology demo that I will post a video of later.
I also recorded a video with Project ACBr about their open source point of sale components for Delphi.
I got a chance to talk with Gabriely, Luiz Sfolia’s daughter. She is enrolled in computer science and I was stuck by her enthusiasm and excitement about everything, including helping her dad run the TMR booth and technical demonstration. We talked about things and want to start a series of interviews with women in tech. This is something I’ve wanted to put together for a while, and I really think Gabriely is the right person. Stay tuned for that as we work out the final details, but I expect this to be fantastic.
There were seven simultaneous tracks all in the same presentation area. Everyone wore a set of headphones so they could hear the speaker they were interested in. The beauty is it allowed attendees to easily switch between sessions, and no sessions had to worry about running out of seats. It was interesting at the end of the talk as the applause moved from group to group across the room.
