Our next stop after Varna was Sofia where DevReach happens. DevReach is one of my favorite conferences in Europe because of sensible prices and strong speakers line-up. Also they have VIP-party after conference and this is good event to meet people you don’t see every day, have some discussion with speakers and find new friends.

Our trip from Varna to Sofia took about 6.5 hours on bus. As I was tired from last evening it wasn’t problem for me as I slept half the trip. After smoking pause in Velike Tarnovo I watched movies from bus TV. We had supper later in city center Happy’s – place with good meat dishes and nice service. And next day it begun…. :)

DevReach 2012

DevReach is held usually in Arena Mladost. It’s near airport and Telerik office. The event is organized by local MVP Martin Kulov together with Telerik. Two days of sessions with strong speakers is good reason enough for me to go to visit some event. Some topics covered by sessions:

• Windows 8 development
• web development
• SharePoint
• Windows Azure
• Windows Phone
• architecture
• Visual Studio

Practically everybody can find some interesting session in every time slot. As the Arena is not huge it is very easy to go from one sessions to another if selected session for time slot is not what you expected.

On the second floor of Arena there are many places where you can eat. There are simple chunk-food places like Burger King and also some restaurants. If you are hungry you will find something for your taste for sure. Also you can buy beer if it is too hot outside :)

Weather was very good for October – practically Estonian summer – 25C and over.

Sessions I visited

Here is the list of sessions I visited at DevReach 2012:

• DevReach 2012 Opening & Welcome Messsage with Martin Kulov and Stephen Forte
• Principled N-Tier Solution Design with Steve Smith
• Data Patterns for the Cloud with Brian Randell
• .NET Garbage Collection Performance Tips with Sasha Goldshtein
• Building Secured, Scalable, Low-latency Web Applications with the Windows Azure Platform with Ido Flatow
• It’s a Knockout! MVVM Style Web Applications with Charles Nurse
• Web Application Architecture – Lessons Learned from Adobe Brackets with Brian Rinaldi
• Demystifying Visual Studio 2012 Performance Tools with Martin Kulov
• SPvNext – A Look At All the Exciting And New Features In SharePoint with Sahil Malik
• Portable Libraries – Why You Should Care with Lino Tadros

I missed some sessions because of some death march projects that are going and that I have to coordinate but it was not big loss as I had time to walk around in session venue neighborhood and see Sofia Business Park.

Next year again!

I will be there again next year and hopefully more guys from Estonia will join me. I think it’s good idea to take short vacation for DevReach time and do things like we did this time – Bucharest, Varna, Sofia. It’s only good idea to plan some more free time so we are not very much in hurry and also we have no work stuff to do on the trip. This far this trip has been one of best trips I have organized and I will go and meet all those guys in this region again! :)