Last June 26, 2009, I, together with my batch mates in BS in Computer Science attended Developers Connect or DEVCON which was held at i1 Building in IT Park, Cebu City. DEVCON is an event that brings together all the software engineers, developers, programmers, students and company owners to infuse camaraderie and to have a good exchange of ideas and new technologies.

Bryan Karl in the DEVCON Event

DEVCON is designed to be a premier gathering of all Filipino software engineers. The Philippine Software Industry Association (PSIA) plans to launch four events (Luzon, Visayas, Mindanao, and Philippines) annually to encourage collaboration, interaction, and mentoring among the leading practitioners of the Philippine Software Industry. DEVCON adapts the global best practices for skills improvement and professional advancement among Filipino software engineers. – http://devcon.ph/

DEVCON started in the afternoon and ended late in the evening. The first few parts of the event were primarily informative talks from senior developers from the industry. There were talks from Winston Damarillo of G2iX, Ryan Gaudalquiver of Oracle Philippines, Mr. Paul Gadi of G2iX and Jerome Gotangco of PSIA. The next part is composed of lightning talks by various people in different IT fields. They shared what’s latest in the IT industry, trends and some other fun related stuff. In between are some games where the answerer could get freebies from Oracle, Linux and G2iX. I got myself two shirts (G2iX and DEVCON) in the raffle.

Developers on Birds of a Feather 1

After the dinner (pizza and pansit, carbo-loaded!), BOF (not Boys Over Flowers) or Birds of a Feather followed. The first topic was the debate between Java, Ruby on Rails and .NET. Here’s a video I got on the Round 2 of BOF 1. I am sorry about the quality. It has been converted to mp4 before it was uploaded.

The Birds of a Feather portion was really fun as you would see in the video. Unfortunately, before they could wrap up the first part of BOF, I already went home since that was already 9 in the evening and I have to travel an hour before I get home. They said that the BOF 2 was about Microsoft versus MAC OS versus Linux. I kept on asking who won BOF 2 but they can’t tell. All they said was Linux (i.e. Ubuntu) sort of won that round. The next activity according to the list of activities is Hackathon, a group dynamics activity. I haven’t heard anything about it from my classmates though so I cannot discuss it.

Computer Science students from UP Cebu

Overall, DEVCON was a fun event. It may not be a perfect one (it started late and the area is too small for all of the participants), it was already good enough for a first time. I’m glad they decided to hold the first DEVCON in the Philippines here in Cebu City. Also, meeting a lot of developers is an overwhelming experience. They sort of reminded us that school’s not even half of what’s out there in the world. Creepy for me. I salute those developers. They seemed like very intelligent beings. And I bet they’re filthy rich. :$:

I heard there will be more DEVCON events this year. So to all developers and students, watch out for the coming of DEVCON in your place. :up:

For more DEVCON pics, visit BSCS 4 goes to Philippines’ first ever DevCon Event. You could also visit the official DEVCON Philippines site.