Build Stuff is a conference with quite a history - 13 years of activity. Looking at the speakers who have spoken there over the years, it's like, wa wa wee wa, nice. The post-conference materials also indicated that it was pretty cool. I had been planning to go for 2 years, and finally, this year, I made it. It was also my first trip to our eastern neighbor, so I was even more excited about the whole thing.

First impression after landing at Vilnius airport - hmm, nicer than most airports I've been to - at least in that one part. Vilnius is not a huge city, so arriving at such an airport after some giant one is really a relief.

airport

The conference takes place in a well-known hotel chain, and staying there for the entire period was super convenient - you could jump straight from breakfast to the sessions or take a 15-minute nap. Besides, the hotel also has a gym, so after hours of listening to valuable stuff, you could get some exercise and use the sauna. That's a big plus for physical health after taking care of intellectual development. Also, kudos to the hotel for the delicious and varied food, I really appreciate the choice.

The conference space at the hotel is quite impressive - there are several rooms of similar size, which made it easy to see which topics were in high demand. The rooms were sometimes packed to the max.

session room

The registration on the first day went very smoothly considering the number of participants. Of course, there were goodies - hoodies and t-shirts. Additional prizes were also up for grabs for visiting the booths of companies presenting in the lobby.

lobby

The main hall had huge screens and great sound, so it was very nice to watch and listen there, not just to the speakers - Chase & Status played during the break allowed the bass speakers to purr pleasantly...

For the conference opening keynote, we got a very cool talk by Richard Campbell about the next decade in programming. Generally, the topics were balanced between soft skills, architecture issues, specific technologies, and of course, the so-called AI.

keynote

Additionally, one room was dedicated to relaxation, with sessions focused on wellbeing, a very good option if you felt overloaded or just wanted to disconnect for a while.

inner room

I mostly attended the more "general" sessions, which I can recommend (if they become available online):

  • Ian Cooper's "Microservices, Where Did It All Go Wrong"
  • Kevlin Henney's "Adventures in Spacetime"
  • Jiachen Jang's "A Developer's Guide to Managing Attention"
  • Russ Miles' "Soft Skills for Technical Teams: The Active Listening Super Power"
  • Sven Peters' "Developer Joy – How great teams get s%*t done"
  • Dean Schuster's "Digital Spit-Fire Interface Rage: How to Calm the Savage User"

Thursday evening was the after-party in the main hall - a live concert with hits for IT :D Awesome - I was humming "i/o, i/o, i/o ohh nooo" to the tune of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for a week. Respect for supporting Ukraine!

afterparty

Unfortunately, I couldn't attend Kevlin Henney's final session, but on the other hand, I had an amazing tour of the cozy interiors of Lukiškės prison at that time.

prison outside prison outside me in prison

Besides, I also managed to walk around Vilnius a bit...

vilnius vilnius vilnius

Unfortunately, I didn't have time to get everywhere I wanted, but I hope to catch up next year, as I came back satisfied with the trip and recommend putting this conference on your list of goals for 2025 if you're planning to attend a conference in the coming year.

And Lithuania, Vilnius 💞, you're doing it right, thank you!

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