On Sunday, I attended DevFest Istanbul conference with my colleague Georgia Ingham. We did a talk on NetBeans and also had a stand where we talked all day to attendees.
DevFest was originally a Google conference but has expanded - Microsoft was a main sponsor at the Istanbul event (which is 5 tracks and 1200 attendees). Most of the attendees are university students learning coding. There were lots of questions for us on Android (as you would expect at a google event) but also a wide range of other questions (NetBeans with Maven and Subversion, Typescript, Java, PHP and a significant interest in Kotlin). There also seemed to be less Eclipse users and more Intellij users this year. We met lots of people who had heard of NetBeans and a nice selection of actual users (on not only Java but PHP and other languages). A significant number were not up to speed on latest developments and the Apache move and we were able to enlighten them. There is an active debate on tools and technologies going on and attending an event like this is a really good way to be in that conversation and promote NetBeans. There was also plenty of socialising and a chance to talk to the other speakers - I believe the party finally finished at 4am….. You can see our picture report at https://blog.idrsolutions.com/2017/11/devfest-istanbul-2017-through-pictures/ and the official DevFest Istanbul site is at https://devfest.istanbul Istanbul is an amazing city if you ever get the change to visit. Kind Regards, MArk
