The main thing about this year’s event was undoubtedly the increase in content quality. The Call for Papers that I released early this year was very successful, we had more than 100 proposals posted, and I had a very tough time selecting just 28 of them. There was no appalling proposal.

After we published the website online in June, we only had 2 people that, unfortunately, had to cancel their participation because of personal matters. We hope they were able to sort out their problems. However, as I said, the event had more than enough proposals to choose from. I really can’t thank enough everybody that took their time to design and post a good proposal.

Even though this event is primarily intended for Brazilians presenting in English in our home country, this year we had 3 outliers that are worth mentioning.

First of all, Itoyanagi Sakura. He sent his talk proposal through the CFP as anyone else. Moreover, after I selected his talk, I was surprised to see it was from someone from Japan. Many thanks to Itoyanagi-san and his company Space Pirates LLC. I think everybody that attended his talk had an enjoyable time. He is originally from Nagasaki, from a humble family and humble beginnings, and he stepped up to become a Ruby Core Team member, primarily maintaining tools like RDoc.

I met a lovely person at Criciuma Dev early this year, Carla De Bona. She is an excellent presenter in the UX/UI area and she is always busy teaching and evangelizing everywhere! I don’t even know how she manages to do all that she does. I was happily surprised to choose her proposal. Looking at the dates, she was one of the very first to post a proposal to the Call for Papers. You should follow her work as well.

Finally, I had the great luck to be able to bring professor Diego Aranha, well known Brazilian security researcher and one of the few that was able to audit the source code for the Brazilian electronic ballot system. In an election year, it is a crucial subject that very few people are aware of the real details. It was a tight schedule, Diego had a flight back to Denmark on the same day he presented at our event. He is now officially retired from the whole Ballot debate, so we were extra lucky to be able to see his last presentation on the subject.

Welcoming foreigners coming to Brazil is nice. So is receiving Brazilians living abroad. Marcelo Wiermann came from Germany. Gabriel Mazetto came from the Netherlands. Additionally, speakers came from many different places in Brazil, such as Rodrigo Urubatan from Rio Grande do Sul. Emerson Macedo came from Rio de Janeiro. Fabio Janiszewski came from Guarapuava. I think I forget other names, but I can’t thank all of them enough for all the effort to participate.

All speakers had important and interesting subjects, going from GDPR discussions, cryptography, new languages such as Kotlin, Elixir, R, Rust, Ruby, front-end development, UX research, the blockchain, Kubernetes, and “devops.” That’s what THE CONF is meant to be: a technology discussion with people doing hands-on work on all of those.

I’m anxious to see all the recordings for all the talks. It takes time to edit everything, but our sponsor and partner InfoQ Brasil is hard at work, and I received word that they are about to finish them! Again, I hope everybody appreciates their support for the conference.

Speaking of support, this year we had a bit more help, from Impulso, OLX, Plataformatec, and iMasters that kindly lent their Hub office for the pre-event happy hour. Too bad it was raining that day, but the venue was great to have. Many thanks to my friend Thiago for the support!

So, are we finally rich this year? :-D

Moreover, like last year, nope. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Again, it’s not my primary goal to have a profit with this event.

For Codeminer, now OmniTrade, it’s an investment.

If you’re an attendee and didn’t know, all the speakers came here of their own volition. They are volunteers that are eager to share their experience with the audience. If you know any of them, make sure you show them your appreciation!

The same goes for the supporting companies. The sponsorship is not expensive, and it’s used to cover some of the costs of the event, so we can keep ticket prices as low as possible. Let’s break it down:

We are short BRL 59,931.00, at least. There are other smaller costs involved that I didn’t add in the list.

Again, who’s paying this bill?

I am. More specifically, my company Codeminer 42 and OmniTrade.

Moreover, I intend to keep organizing this event because we think it’s important to set a standard and because it personally interests me. There is still no conference held in Brazil where Brazilians speak in English.

One example? A couple of people complained a bit (not a serious complaint, more like a remark) that some speakers didn’t have excellent English.

Of course, they didn’t; up to this day, we had no idea what a good “Brazilian English” accent even is. There is no baseline. There is no standard to make comparisons. There is not enough material anywhere. Of course, we should not expect the same accent compared to someone born and raised in the USA; we don’t live in the USA. Brazilians naturally have an accent of their own.

When InfoQ Brasil releases the videos, there will be around 60 videos. The very first 60 videos of Brazilian speakers delivering their talks in English while in Brazil. There is no other repository like this in the technology community, which is why we think it’s essential to keep up.

Before our event, if anyone suggested doing a meetup all in English, they would have been laughed at, ridiculed. At least now this event serves as a reference and a new standard. I even suggested that every group everywhere starts an #EnglishChallenge in their communities.

Already I’ve seen a few meetups following this model. It’s great practice. Every programmer should invest their time learning English to stay ahead. Also, they shouldn’t feel ridiculed for doing so. Who says you need to travel abroad to train your English?

More importantly: almost all attendees of this conference came of their own volition. They attended because they wanted to, not because someone told them so. When I asked how many people were not from Sao Paulo city, half the audience raised their hands again.

These are forward-thinking people. It’s the same kind of people that were attending my first Rubyconf Brasil back in 2008. They created an entire market in the following decade.

How do I know that? Tech events in Brazil have to distribute “certificates” for their audience, so the sponsoring companies know that their employees attended the conference. We don’t distribute certificates, because this audience doesn’t need them.

They invested their money and their time. It’s only fair that we do the same.

Did it work?

It is working!

We had more than 300 people last year. We had more than 300 people this year. Imagine this: a very niche, new-tech, and English-only conference with no translations. It’s a recipe for failure, and yet it stands strong once again.

We are already planning for 2019. Yes, we have to plan it almost one year in advance. It’s not possible to do an acceptable event with less than that.

As this is not a for-profit event, any help is welcome. How can you help?

1. pay attention to our social networks, Call for Papers should open around March. When you see it, help us share it to as many people as possible. The more, the merrier.

2. in 2019 we will probably move the dates from September to August due to venue schedules, so also keep an eye on our updates and again, help us by sharing about the conference.

As you can see: we need more people talking more about the event. You have no idea how a simple thing as a retweet helps. Marketing is the one thing that is very expensive and that attendees gain nothing from at the event. Help us spend less on marketing efforts and more in venue goodies.

If your company is interested in helping with our costs, please send us an email and let’s talk. Our conference is not expensive, and this audience is very promising, one that is worth reaching out to.

To summarize:

• Want to sponsor? E-mail us at contact@theconf.com.br
• Want to keep updated? Follow our Twitter account or Facebook Page.
• Follow us on Twitter to keep up to date.
• I posted the photos on our Facebook Page
• Videos are coming!

The 2018 edition is a wrap! Preparations for the 2019 edition, already started! Let’s make the Third Edition the biggest one!

Not only that, also as promised, the best talks were also published in the USA InfoQ website fulfilling our mission of trying to showcase more Brazilians to the worldwide audience!

We’re almost done with the 2017 edition.

As we stated before, out of the 32 talks, I will select 5 to showcase in the USA InfoQ website. You can help out in the process by sharing the playlist and liking your favorites. I’ll take that into consideration as well.

If you missed this year’s edition, don’t forget to read about the Initiative that I kicked off in October of 2016. And also the report of the 2017 edition.

We actually did it: 31 Brazilian speakers, coming from all around the globe (yes, we had Brazilians living in Canada, the Netherlands, Germany also coming here), and they all delivered great talks in ENGLISH. Finally, a Tech Conference in Brazil that anyone on the planet can consume, enjoy and learn.

It was a long year, we did the “M.V.P.” style, a spartan planning. Some people didn’t believe in the concept. Many waited to see it actually happen to finally say something. We struggled to make it happen. But it was all worth it. InfoQ Brasil and all the companies that sent great speakers, and the community that helped share the message from the beginning, I sincerely salute and thank you a lot! It would not be possible without your help.

Against all odds, we pulled it off.

And I am committing myself to try and improve the 2nd edition, already confirmed for 2018, Sep 21-22. Follow our Facebook Page and our Twitter account. A simple share, retweet, really helps a lot, please contribute!

Also, watch my opening keynote to understand more of the event rationale.

If you want to see the 2017 website, with the full program and all the supporting companies, I put it here.

2017 was the prototype. Help us improve the rough edges for 2018.

Keep an eye on the social networks, the Call for Papers will open probably around April 2018.

First and foremost, thanks to everybody that not only believed in the concept but actively helped us through this journey.

I posted about the concept on October 20, 2016, in “THE CONF Initiative” blog post. Everybody that has been paying attention to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Facebook Groups (Ruby on Rails, Go, Xamarin, Security, etc) saw the SEVERAL posts I have been doing in the past few months in multiple channels (sorry for the mini spam).

On the very same day I got this e-mail from InfoQ (who I didn’t know before):

This is how InfoQ joined us. They directly sponsored all the video recording and editing, and they will upload all the talks for free in their channels. I’ll update this post and the social network pages when they do.

I opened the Call for Papers by March of 2017 and it remained open until May 31. And I kept trying to find people in private to fill in the many gaps. Although we had 80 proposals (to fill in 30 slots), it’s always hard work. I didn’t reach out to anyone directly until well after the Call for Papers closed.

Let me be very clear: this event is not supposed to supersede or replace any existing event in Brazil. They are doing an amazing job in many different areas. From a focus on beginners up to enterprise and specific techs.

THE CONF is primarily a “CODE ONLY” event, prioritizing A.I./Machine Learning (which I will have to search harder), Data Sciences, Gaming, and preferably non-Web or Advanced-Web topics. It’s meant for anyone with hands-on and ongoing experience in those fields to present their most current experience.

If you’re interested, keep following our Twitter account and Facebook Page. We will open Call for Papers for the 2018 Edition around March of 2018.

Of all the speakers that were selected, only 2 had to drop out for personal reasons. When I selected the Ruby Code Style talk, then I saw it was Gabi Stefanini, she asked to put her good friend Volmer from Shopify together. Unfortunately, he had a health issue and couldn’t fly from Canada, I hope he’s ok now. Fortunately, Paulo Diniz, who came from Germany, was able to fill in on the final debate panel.

At least 2 slots remained open, and for many reasons, I kept them open until the very last minute, when many private invitations I made didn’t pan out, I had to resort to my good friends Bernardo and Victor from Stone Pagamentos, and Esdras and Julien. Because I waited for responses that never came for too long, they only had a couple of days to prepare for the event. I thank them very much for accepting such rough conditions and still delivering good talks.

All the speakers were phenomenal, not one of them was late (and many of them traveled from very far to participate). They all had their talks prepared and trained. They all respected the slot time. And they were all friendly to everybody. I could not have asked for more.

Are we RICH already? :-D

Of course not! ¯(ツ)/¯ That was never the intention.

I’ve been organizing events for the past 10 years. As I explained in my “The Next 10 Years” post, I never directly made any profit on any events I delivered. I do them because I have the core belief that by helping others improve I increase my own chances of growing in this industry.

My full-time job is CTO of Code Miner 42, my own company. And my main priority is the well-being of the more than 65 families that depend on our success. So every event I organize eats up my own life as I wouldn’t risk my responsibilities to my direct employees.

So, the sole organizers of this event are myself, my Code Miner partner and co-founder Rodrigo, and plus part-time help from a good friend of mine with experience in events infrastructure. 2 and 1/2 people.

Who else? Leandro from C4Media/InfoQ is exclusively helping with posts and now with the video editing and publishing of the content, his company paid for that directly.

Who else? The speakers are amazing, each and every one of them came on their own, on the same belief that by helping and inspiring others they will also increase their own chances of success. If I could I would pay them to come, but I can’t. Which is why I really want to highlight how important they are. Some of them came from very far: Canada, Germany, USA.

That being said, as I don’t have any non-disclosure agreements with anyone else I can finally show you how much it costs to produce an event like this:

So yes, we are short BRL 50,000, at least. And I am not even adding the more than BRL 2,000 (approximately as I have Code Miner stuff in the mix) of Google Ads and Facebook Post Boosts. There are more costs involved, but that’s the ballpark.

Who paid those 50 grand? I did.

I didn’t spend too much time looking for sponsors as I knew the concept was too unproven. We could have had 10 attendees for all we knew. So Code Miner decided to prove the concept on its own.

This is not a surprise, from day one, we knew how much we would have to invest to see this through. This is all part of the plan. Don’t worry, we are aiming for the long-term here.

Of course, we had shortcomings. Unfortunately, we were not able to add breakfast or coffee, or high-speed public Wi-fi, or more perks. I hope next year we find sponsors to help out with those items. And again, to be clear, any sponsorship never comes to me. The sponsors pay the suppliers directly.

If your company wants to sponsor those missing items, please contact us.

Did it work?

It paid back in spades already.

Shortcomings aside, the main question was: would it be feasible to have Brazilians speak English to a Brazilian audience? And more: would Brazilians pay to come see other Brazilians speaking in English?

Yes, to both!

With more than 300 people paying with their own coin, we now know for sure that this concept not only works, but it fills a gap that no one else was delivering.

My opening keynote was a shout out to every Brazilian to lose their fears of speaking in English. We will soon have more than 30 recorded talks of Brazilians speaking about many different interesting tech-only topics. Once this concept spreads, more and more people around the world will not only notice but value us accordingly. This is a long-term plan, but the first step was very successful.

We did have at least 2 foreigners in the audience that I met personally (one British, one German) who were able to sit in the audience during the 2 days and finally understand everything we were saying. Now we can confidently invite our neighbor friends in countries such as Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, etc. Who knows, if next year we can close the gap between all of us and make new friends.

The website is called “theconf.club” because the idea is not to create a monopoly on English-spoken events in Brazil. More than half of the attendees came from out of São Paulo city. From what I heard, they were all inspired by all the speakers, and they left with a renewed sense of duty and hope.

This is already one immediate result that I hope more people copy: “São Paulo Programming Meetup in English”. It doesn’t matter how you do it. If it’s a 100 people event, or even if it’s a 5 people gathering whether it’s a public meetup or a private tech talk in your company or college. Just do it! Start practicing.

Why do I incur so much financial “loss” and hard work far exceeding my job description? Take a very close look at this photo. They are students from Brasilia University. They drove 15 hours to come see this event. Those are the only kind of people I care about whenever I think it’s too hard.

Next Steps

Now, we have a lot of work to do. As I said before, we all do this in our spare time, and we use the sweat of our brows to make it happen.

We are about to close the contract with a convention center to fix the dates for next year (probably September, follow us to see confirmation).

Call for Papers will open around March 2018 (again, follow us to participate). As usual I will use as many communication channels as I can, but everybody can help spread the word. As it was this year, there are no restrictions to participate, only follow the core concept of the conference: English-Only talks about Advanced Tech-Only having Hands-On experience with them.

We will publish all the high-quality photographs on our Facebook Page.

We need more sponsors - not to make a profit, mind you - but to provide attendees with more perks: Wifi (did you know good Wifi equipment and bandwidth costs BRL 20k?? Yep, not cheap), Food, Beverage, etc. And to provide speakers more conditions to participate.

This is an email I got TODAY:

This is how people that genuinely want to help are reaching out.

Keep training and spreading the concept in your city and groups. If you have meetup pages, send them to us (@theconfbr) and we will retweet them.

To summarize:

• Want to sponsor? E-mail us at contact@theconf.com.br
• Want to keep updated? Follow our Twitter account or Facebook Page.
• We are starting a YouTube Channel and Instagram account
• All the video recordings at InfoQ

The 2017 edition was successfully delivered. Preparations for the 2018 edition start now!

Welcome to Rapture THE CONF!

Update 04/04/2017: Most of the event infrastructure and suppliers are contracted, the event is a GO! And the Call for Papers is up until May, submit your talk proposals as soon as possible.

Update 12/09/2016: We confirmed the dates of Sep 29-30 of 2017 at Centro de Convenções Rebouças. Reserve the dates in your calendar!

I was the main curator and organizer of all Rubyconf Brasil events and I have been doing Ruby related events and talks in Brasil for the past 10 years. My last Rubyconf Brasil in 2016 had almost 1,200 attendees coming from all over the country.

I also did talks in international events such as Locos x Rails 2009, Railsconf 2010, RubyKaigi 2011, Toster 2012, Bubbleconf 2012, and others. In smaller scale I travelled all over Brasil doing more than 150 talks as well.

My main goal was to foster a healthy Brazilian Ruby community as well as help growing a better class of local software developers.

But I still have an annoying scratching itch that never went away.

When I decided to organize a Ruby-centric event in Brazil, 10 years ago, my main concern was if the subject would be interesting enough to have momentum. I had a personal goal in mind: a Railsconf-comparable conference, reaching for 1,000 attendees, consistently happening for 10 years.

The initial goal was reached a few years ago, since at least 2013 when we reached the magic 1,000 number and 2016 reached my personal number “10” conferences in a row.

But the format of Brazilian tech events still gives me that itch.

To put it in perspective, some big conferences attract people from all over the world. Notable examples are Railsconf, OSCON, Microsoft Build, QCon NY, QCon SF, ApacheCon, LinuxCon, Apple WWDC, Google I/O, etc.

Some of them for obvious reasons. If you want to know the hottest news on Apple, you have to attend WWDC. Many of those example have exclusive content from the organizer’s companies such as Facebook or Google.

Other conferences attract people due to their roster of speakers’ reputations. And in turn they attract more speakers that want to be in that roster. It’s maybe the case of OSCON, or QCon.

Conundrum

This section can become quite confusing so I will try to be as much direct and to point as I can. I will narrow down the narrative to Brazil, but the same argument can be applied to any country in Latin America. Please, bear with me.

First of all, our conferences are all presented in Brazilian Portuguese, exclusively to a Brazilian audience.

To increase their reputation, big events here bring “international” guest speakers - and by “international” I mean “from out of Latin America”, such as USA, Europe.

The local audience go to those event sometimes just because of the quality of those guests.

The untold truth is that most of those guests wouldn’t come out of their own volition without an invitation and financial incentives. But those same speakers usually compete to speak in USA or European events. I am not criticizing them! This is a natural consequence and I would do the same if I were them.

This is the symptom of how Brazilian events are made. They are very well done and effective for the intended audience: Brazilians. Simultaneously making them not attractive for everybody else.

It’s a matter of economics, because it’s expensive to come here, the visa process for americans is annoying, and they get better exposition on a more diverse event that understands English.

At the same time, we have several great Brazilian developers applying to speak at american or european events to gain more exposure, exactly for the same reasons: our Brazilian events lack in audience reach because they are mostly made just for Brazilians.

Only Brazilians speak Brazilian Portuguese.

The international audience is not aware of the quality of our Brazilian speakers because we are not doing a good job advertising that!

One first step to remedy this situation is to try something never attempted here: to create a Brazilian conference where the main language of presentation is English. Surprisingly, I believe this doesn’t sound like a big deal for anyone, anywhere in the world, but for Brazilians!

This won’t increase the ammount of international speakers wanting to come here, and this is not the goal.

The goal is to create an Internationally Recognizable stage for our highly-skilled developers to speak up to a larger audience. This audience would be able to watch them either coming here or online. Because no american will ever try to watch a Brazilian recorded talk that is spoken in Portuguese, but they will have no problem watching a Brazilian speaking in English.

Not only our conferences are not attractive for English-speaking audiences, but they are not attractive even for our fellow neighbors in Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, etc.

Brazil is a big Portuguese-speaking island surrounded by Spanish-speaking countries in a globalized English-speaking world.

We can do better.

From Brazil, to the World

The real change is to create an internationally visible stage in Brazilian soil.

And for that we could try to create the very first Latin American Tech Conference entirely in English. I never attended FOSDEM but I heard that attendees there speak Dutch, French, German but most content is presented in English exactly for that diversity. Europeans are certainly better adjusted to multiple languages than Brazilians are. We live in a globalized and diverse world, and like it or not, the technology lingua-franca is English.

Brazil, and Latin America in general, has many talented and hard-working developers competing in the international arena. Many core contributors to big open source projects, many programmers working in renowed companies, and even CTOs to USA and European companies are from Brazil.

For example, did you know that former Director of Engineering of SoundCloud in Berlin and now Director of Engineering at DigitalOcean NY is a Brazilian? Actually his own team there has a dozen of Brazilians. Did you know that Godaddy has a Brazilian as VP of Software Engineering? You have Brazilian engineers working at Heroku, Gitlab, startups such as Doximity, Pipefy. And that’s not even counting the big Brazilian tech companies such as Nubank, the flagship all-online credit card and one of the largest successful cases of Clojure in the world. Elixir, the language that is conquering hearts and minds, again invented and built by a Brazilian living in Poland. Xamarin, one of the major catalysts for Microsoft into the OSS world is founded by a Mexican, and it has important Brazilian engineers. Crystal, the brand new language that promises to bring Ruby-like enjoyment to the low-level compiled world was invented and built by an Argentinian. If you’re a Rails developer you definitely used Devise in your projects, one of the most ubiquitous library in the Rails community, made and maintained by brazilians. And I can go on and on.

I am not saying that worldwide speakers would flock to come here, that’s not even the point. But I know that many tech companies throughout the world are in need to hire great developers, wherever they are.

This is one of the many things foreigners don’t know about Latin American software developers: we are literally on par with anyone from anywhere in the world. You just need to know where to look.

We are not low-quality cheap labor.

We are near-shore, top-quality, skillful and educated software engineers. And this is not hubris.

But we are doing a very poor job at advertising that to the world.

Most conferences in Brazil are in Brazilian-Portuguese only, with a couple of foreigner guest speakers (usually requiring some form of translation). They are made exclusively to showcase technology and brands to a beginner-level audience, but they don’t do a lot to showcase our potential to that international arena.

What if one event made in Brazil finally raises that bar, presenting our cream of the crop, in English?

Would that alienate the Latin American audience? I don’t think so. I have been experimenting in the last couple of years and my event alone, Rubyconf Brazil, didn’t have any simultaneous translations. An audience of almost 1,000 attendees listened to English-only speakers without any problems whatsoever.

Heck, our guests that came from Argentina presented in English in a Brazilian conference!

This is the result of years of having hundreds of screencasts and events recorded made available on YouTube! Thousands of hours of online classes over Code School, Code Academy and many others. Hundreds of ebooks from Pragmatic Programmer and other publishers. Brazilians are consuming all that for years, and by the way, did you know that one of the top instructors at Code School is a Brazilian?

There are dozens of great small to big tech conferences all over the continent, introducing technology to many young people wanting to learn more. They are doing a fantastic job already. But there is still a big gap between those events and the worldwide arena of international events, and I think this proposal is one step in the direction to finally close this gap.

It’s about damn time we bring more attention to that fact in a conference that welcomes anyone from anywhere in the world.

So the first criteria for such an event is that every speaker presents in English, where all recorded material is available and accessible to anyone in the world.

Code-Only aNd Fun - No-Frills

I believe a conference should have focus.

Any event that tries to squeeze everything in ends up having their identities diluted so much that every tech event becomes similar to every other tech event.

Instead, I’d rather have an event for programmers, made by programmers, with a focus on programming and creativity by means of software. I’d like to have a mostly technical event, with the main goal of showcasing the Latin America capacity.

So the second criteria would be for the speakers to send proposals focused on code. Preferably open source code of his own authorship, but subjects around software development at the very least. No propaganda to advertise services or products. No self-help topics. I want to focus around the craft of software.

One example of interesting code would be something such as Sonic Pi a live coding music synth DSL written in Ruby. How about Ruby 2600, an Atari emulator written in Ruby by Brazilian developer Chester? Or this presentation about interface testing with Diablo 3 again presented by fellow Brazilian developer Rodrigo Caffo at Rubyconf 2012? Or this talk about Sprockets by another fellow Brazilian developer and Rails Core Committer Rafael França, presented at RailsConf 2016? Or this talk about Crystal presented by fellow Argentinian developer Ary Borenszweig in Prague last year?

And out of the Ruby world, there are many great examples in communities as diverse as Python, Javascript, Go, and so on.

Part of this concept came to me while watching Koichi Sasada’s keynote at Rubyconf Brazil 2014. Koichi is a Japanese Ruby Core Committer and he mentioned his concept of “EDD: Event Driven Development”, meaning that he speeds up prior to speaking at important conferences.

Many developers begin new open source code or speed up their contributions near to presenting at events. It’s a positive cycle. This kind of event I am proposing could be a catalyst to exactly this kind of positive cycle in Latin America. Code that leads to more Code.

So the main criteria would be Code Only aNd Fun!

“THE CONF” Initiative

Every new implementation should start small, and a code-only event should also have it’s Beta stage.

My initial criteria:

• Code-Only
• And Fun, of course, or “No-Frills” if you prefer.
• All in English, All inclusive for everybody from anywhere.
• Mainly (but not exclusively) focused around great Latin American developers.

The Target: realistically it will be primarily targetting Brazilians (and I hope, some of our Latin American friends) locally, and the International audience of software developers, at least online. I believe it may be an event for around 300 attendees, maybe around 20 speakers. If we can gather at least that, it would be a superb first step.

The Goals: to create a Latin American stage to showcase our skills, in practice, to the world. Less non-Latin American speakers at first, no sponsored talks to sell products. Mostly Code.

If I am not mistaken this would be the very first Latin American conference, with Latin American speakers, with the mission of eventually becoming an Internationally Recognizable conference. One that would primarily attract and bring together communities all over Latin America and that eventually becomes recognized by the worldwide community of developers and enterprises looking to hire our great developers or companies, no matter where they are.

If you like the idea and want to participate, start following @theconfbr Twitter account and the Facebook page. This is basically the very first “draft” of the idea and this is the time to send suggestions. The more support I see, the easier it will be to decide to go forward or not.

I still don’t have a date, but if the idea shows potential and people support it, I’d like to aim for the 3rd quarter of 2017. Show your support, send your suggestions, this will help me make a decision and how to best implement it.