A presentation at Developer Relations Summit by Chris Heilmann
Cat herding with lions and tigers How we organise a 15,000 attendee developer conference…
clxi.org/wad25
15,000 developers 10 Stages 600 presentations , 2400 hours of 4k footage ~40 people company 7 person DevRel/Events team
Nurture and build a community
Find, nurture and build a community Magazine Newsletter Live Show Podcast
Find, nurture and build a community That’s how we find: CfP reviewers Speakers Moderators Workshop Trainers Volunteers
Find, nurture and build a community The good news: This is accumulative, and people can have a “career” along this trajectory…
Find great partners
Find great partners AV Crews of entertainment > confererence folk Exhibitors that work around stages, not against Coach partners who to send as speakers
Use great tools
Use great tools Sessionize works and allows for comparative filtering. Ticket sales: Ti.to Streaming: YouTube Event App: in-house
Things to be adamant about…
Have one source of truth
Have one source of Truth Every session and speaker need to have a unique ID Everything else will change - all the time Going by ID allows for post production automation
Record in the highest quality
Record in the highest quality Good audio and video costs money and needs experts Ensure to get slides and videos from speakers Have lots of external hard drives
Avoiding Pain
Automate locally, use the cloud to host
Automate locally, use the cloud to host We have a ton of content: Weekly newsletter Weekly live show with guests Magazine articles every few days Podcast every few days 10 years World Congress: ~2500 – 3000 hours of talk and workshop footage x 10 This year it is 12 TB of data
Automate locally, use the cloud to host Exporting as CSV from sessionize enabled us: To create title slides / thumbnails To batch download and convert videos
Automate locally, use the cloud to host https://www.wearedevelopers.com/en/magazine/466/processing175-wearedeveloper-world-congress-talk-videos-in-5-hours
Automate locally, use the cloud to host https://www.wearedevelopers.com/en/magazine/621/efficientlycut-huge-4k-videos-using-ffmpeg-and-php-621
Enable postevent impact
Enable post-event impact Dirty secret: Hardly anybody watches talk recordings. The longer the talk, the harsher the drop-off.
Enable post-event impact
Enable post-event impact
Enable post-event impact
Enable post-event impact
Enable post-event impact
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Come along for the ride!
WeAreDevelopers World Congress Berlin, Germany 08-10/07/2026
WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America San Jose, California 23-25/09/2026
Thanks! ChristianHeilmann.com WeAreDevelopers.com Developer-Advocacy.com chris@wearedevelopers.com @codepo8@toot.cafe @codepo8.bsky.social linkedin.com/in/christianheilmann/
How we organise a 15,000 attendee developer conference…
for free. You
can too.