Cat herding with lions and tigers

A presentation at Developer Relations Summit in November 2025 in by Chris Heilmann

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Cat herding with lions and tigers How we organise a 15,000 attendee developer conference…

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clxi.org/wad25

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15,000 developers 10 Stages 600 presentations , 2400 hours of 4k footage ~40 people company 7 person DevRel/Events team

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Nurture and build a community

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Find, nurture and build a community Magazine Newsletter Live Show Podcast

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Find, nurture and build a community That’s how we find: CfP reviewers Speakers Moderators Workshop Trainers Volunteers

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Find, nurture and build a community The good news: This is accumulative, and people can have a “career” along this trajectory…

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Find great partners

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Find great partners AV Crews of entertainment > confererence folk Exhibitors that work around stages, not against Coach partners who to send as speakers

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Use great tools

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Use great tools Sessionize works and allows for comparative filtering. Ticket sales: Ti.to Streaming: YouTube Event App: in-house

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Things to be adamant about…

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Have one source of truth

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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

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Record in the highest quality

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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

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Avoiding Pain

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Automate locally, use the cloud to host

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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

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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

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Automate locally, use the cloud to host https://www.wearedevelopers.com/en/magazine/466/processing175-wearedeveloper-world-congress-talk-videos-in-5-hours

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Automate locally, use the cloud to host https://www.wearedevelopers.com/en/magazine/621/efficientlycut-huge-4k-videos-using-ffmpeg-and-php-621

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Enable postevent impact

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Enable post-event impact Dirty secret: Hardly anybody watches talk recordings. The longer the talk, the harsher the drop-off.

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Come along for the ride!

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WeAreDevelopers World Congress Berlin, Germany 08-10/07/2026

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WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America San Jose, California 23-25/09/2026

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Thanks! ChristianHeilmann.com WeAreDevelopers.com Developer-Advocacy.com chris@wearedevelopers.com @codepo8@toot.cafe @codepo8.bsky.social linkedin.com/in/christianheilmann/