As my last event of 2023, I recently got the opportunity to attended the in-person leg of React Day Berlin. As a Principal Developer Advocate at Auth0 by Okta, I spend a large portion of my time going to events like this, talking with Developers on all things Customer Identity & Access Management (a.k.a. CIAM). It wasn’t an event which I’d originally planned to attend, rather I was a last-minute substitute for a colleague who was unfortunately unable to make it. But boy, am I glad I was free to go! What an amazing high-energy opportunity to connect with such a fantastic group of folks!!
It wasn’t all plain sailing though 😳 Living as I do in the South West of England, I usually prefer to fly from Bristol, which is my local airport. As flying typically means I’m going to be visiting somewhere in Europe, flying from Bristol usually involves me going to Amsterdam or Copenhagen first. So I get to Bristol Airport in plenty of time and am sat waiting for my departure to Amsterdam. I’d already been informed that my onward flight from Amsterdam to Berlin had been cancelled: bad weather in Amsterdam is playing havoc with things at Schiphol Airport. And it wasn’t even certain if my flight from Bristol (to Amsterdam) would depart either 🥺 My (revised) plan was to get to Amsterdam and then catch a train to Berlin; trains from Amsterdam to Berlin were apparently still running, so that seems like a good option 😎 As I sat there I messaged the rest of my team to keep them updated…and it’s a good job I did! One of my colleagues pinged me to say that Deutsche Bahn have a strike planned! As I’m checking the train timetable – yep, sure enough, a train journey’s not going to cut it – the display board at the airport says my flight from Bristol…is now cancelled 🤦🏻 It was beginning to feel like I was in Planes, Trains And Automobiles! (a movie I’d highly recommend if you’ve never seen it); in the end I decide to hot-foot it to London Heathrow – read drive 3 hours – and take a direct flight to Berlin! That was a long day, I can tell you 😂
It was, however, definitely worth all the effort! Joined by one of my colleagues from the Auth0 Solutions Engineering team at Okta, I had a fabulous time connecting with Developers, Content Makers, co-Sponsors and the like. The GitNation team, who hosted the event, couldn’t have been more accommodating. And the team at Kosmos – the event venue – were ready and eager to help out with any eventuality.
We setup our booth (pictures above) in the hour before the doors “officially” opened. And were pretty much inundated the entire day (see the pictures below)! I love events like that: sure, I didn’t get to attend the talks I’d planned to, but there really wasn’t a dull moment!
What was also particularly exciting for me was that it was my first chance to showcase CIAM Discovery at an event, particularly the CIAM Discovery Kit which was there in a “pilot” outing. Discovery Kit, in particular, ended up being a real eye-catcher; something of a novelty one could say! Very much a “surprise” and “delight” attention grabber; both of which are bywords at a booth! Folks loved the artwork, and were intrigued by both the QR codes and the support for NFC, so much so that the content aspects of Discovery attracted some pretty healthy views as a result. There were some really great comments too, including the likes of “wow, this is so novel!” and “what an interesting concept; so colorful and fun!” We even had a few of the folks from the other booths come over and comment too!
If you’re a front-end developer, or even if you just get involved with the front-end as part of full-stack development et-al, and you get the opportunity to visit React Day Berlin in 2024…take it! You won’t be disappointed! 🎉
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