Maps gave me two options to the conference venue: walk alongside the highway, or cut through "the park."
Naturally, I picked the park. Who wouldn't with this in its entry?
What Maps called a park was, in fact, a forest 🌲. So there I was, conference-ready, laptop bag slung over my shoulder, nice shoes and all, strolling through actual woods like I was auditioning for a hiking ad. 🚶
Further in, the path was flooded. Someone before me had improvised a bridge out of what I can only describe as twigs (they were, structurally speaking, not twigs, and I chose not to think too hard about that while crossing).
Then, just when I was sure I'd finally reach the venue, the trees opened up onto a cornfield. A full, sprawling cornfield. I stood there for a second, looked around, and just laughed. This is awesome.
And there it was: the conference center, right on the other side.
A colleague and I had been invited over from the Symfony community and TYPO3 has adopted a good chunk of Symfony components under the hood, so the overlap made sense. TYPO3 DevDays itself kept that same energy going: warm, welcoming, genuinely good vibes from start to finish. But the thing that made me think more than the forest, the bridge, or the corn.
It was how many speakers, across totally different talks, kept circling back to the same idea: build for your users. Not for the framework, not for the demo, not for what's technically impressive, but for the actual person on the other end.
Now that the walk and conference has finished, I am stuck with two things. First, how crazy it was to walk through a forest to reach a tech-con 😅 and second, the importance of end user feels like it is always implied, but never really actively worked on. (I am look at you 👀, stake-holders 🧑💼)
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