Over the last several years, tech conferences have become vital for presenting Ukraine on the global information technologies arena.
“A tech conference is a tool for attracting attention to IT in Ukraine,” Anastasia Sleptsova, organizer of an international English-language forum, the Black Sea Summit, told the Kyiv Post. “People have heard of Ukrainian IT; that it’s cool. Nobody has seen it, however.”
And if most of the conferences in Ukraine, including Sleptsova’s Black Sea Summit, are focusing either on presenting early startup ideas or on revealing of details of a business side of any company, a conference called Build Stuff is all about the true essence of IT – code writing.
And while many label this conference as too narrow and “only for real geeks,” its organizer, a coder himself, Gregory Young, thinks that’s not true.
“I don’t really think it’s a niche conference. If we look only at the market in Ukraine, there are tens of thousands of developers,” Young told the Kyiv Post, sitting right in the heart of the Build Stuff conference: in its demo zone, where tens of IT companies entertain attendees with both modern and already obsolete video game consoles.
Build Stuff attendees play video games at Olimpiyskiy National Sports Complex on Nov. 22 (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
Microsoft Content Developer Rachel Appel doesn’t think the conference is niche either.
“Build Stuff has a great reputation amongst developers, even back in the USA, which is where I am from – the East Coast,” Appel told the Kyiv Post. “It tends to be focused on good programming, on software development principles – that’s the kind of stuff I mean to do.”
“Some of the many other conferences,” Appel went on, “cater to the beginner crowd. Here you have deeper content – it’s not such fluffy content that you might see at the other conferences.”
This has been the second time Young and his wife have arranged the conference in Kyiv.
“IT potential in Ukraine is huge right now, and it’s gonna keep growing for at least another decade,” Young said. According to him, there are many reasons for this. “Mainly, it is a highly educated population,” he pointed, adding that difficulties in obtaining visas prevents Ukraine from suffering brain drain.
“This is gonna sound awful,” he started, “but one of the main advantages of Ukraine is that – unlike let’s say in Poland or Lithuania – people can’t leave. The very best developers have tendency to stay here. And bring up other developers.”
Christopher Condron, a principal software architect at PerkinElmer, talks to the audience from one of the Build Stuff stages on Nov. 22. The topic of his speech is “Teaching Your Team CQRS/ES 2.0.” (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
Build Stuff managed to bring nearly 900 of these bright minds to Olimpiyskiy National Sports Complex during two days starting Nov. 21. The tickets price ranged from 159 euros to 289 euros.
“The price is so small, compared to the price it should actually cost,” claims Gregory Young’s wife Neringa, Build Stuff’s co-organizer. “In Europe, people are more open. People there attend different conferences throughout the year. Ukrainians, however, tend to choose one favorite and wait all year.”
A Build Stuff visitor plays video games. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
The Youngs have managed to bring to Ukraine around 50 international speakers, including professionals from such well-known IT companies as Uber, EPAM, Microsoft, Lohica, Ve Interactive. They said there weren’t any problems convincing people to come to Ukraine. Few had some prejudices, though.
“You do run into people whose perception of what Ukraine is very different from the reality,” Gregory Young said. “They, for instance, worry about being shot down, or that there will be missiles falling around. Which, for real, is not what Ukraine is all about.”
“And we talked to them to make sure they understand what Ukraine actually is. And that that’s not necessarily what they believe it to be.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Denys Krasnikov can be reached at [email protected].
