Reflections on DevCon 2024
Workday’s Developer Conference (DevCon) is the go-to event of the year for any Workday builder out there!
10 years on from one of the first hackathons and only 2 years from the first major in-person event, Workday DevCon is firing on all cylinders!
Read on for highlights and takeaways from this year’s DevCon.
The Logistics
The layout was phenomenal this year, I only got lost 1 time and that was completely my fault :)
Everything was reasonably walkable and pretty much a straight shot from one end to another. At no point did I find myself rushing or running to a session, leisurely strolling was what the doctor ordered.
The sessions were precisely timed to leave enough room so one could pleasantly walk to the next session and happily bump into people along the way. The only gotcha with the timing was not having a chance for questions during the sessions. Fortunately, the speakers were available for a few minutes afterwards before we were promptly kicked out in preparation for the next session.
The one hiccup was the “Theater” sessions which were placed in the middle of the expo floor…
This was more like watching a suspense movie in the middle of an indoor playground at a mall during a holiday shopping season. After noticing how few seats were available, I saw why the signups filled out so quickly. I hope next year all sessions are more spacious and these in-expo sessions are moved further away from the main expo floor. Understandably, not every session can take place in a large, dedicated room so a balance is necessary.
A balance also witnessed with the food on offer; it felt a little bit of a slot machine with how good it was at times and then not-so good at other times. For the most part, the food met my needs but I could hear talk about ordering food elsewhere to supplement.
Either way, I was ecstatic to have dumplings at the DevCon after Dark event… during DevCon 22 the dumplings were the first things to go and they were the talk of the night after that. Exploring the expo floor and grabbing food + drinks was a highlight for me and I hope we can get more of these types of soirees in the future.
Talking about the Expo floor, we had the typical Workday service partners but I was, again, surprised this year by how few 3rd party vendors were present. From the top of my head, Rooster (Interview Scheduling) and Google (ML platform) had booths among the sea of service partners. I feel there is untapped synergy between the customers + developers on the Workday side that could benefit from connecting with more diverse software partners.
From a prior Rising, I extolled the presence of an entire sub-classification of vendors so seeing so few here leaves me wanting more.
And wanting more is definitely on my mind! With the number of activities, people to talk to, and content to consume, I’m formally asking for 3 days of DevCon!
Yes, that could mean almost a week of activities since there were pre-conference trainings and the hackathon capping it off but I truly think more time for braindates and content would be a net positive.
On Point Content and Speakers
All the sessions I was able to make had high quality speakers with polished presentations and often OG’s from Workday’s Integration space. Honorable mentions include:
- Doug Lee and John Smail talking about re-usable orchestrations
- EE Wallace and Praveen Hari walking the audience through orchestration use-cases
- Diana Serpa and Remy McMurray diving into Orchestration for Integrations
- And finally, Joe Lee + Joe Lee talking about Joe Lee (which ended up being renamed to Joining Two Powerhouse Technologies: Extend and Prism)
One hope I have next year is to see more sessions dedicated to soft-skills and project management similar to Christian Hopkin’s distinguished Architecting Extend session and Eric Chung’s revolutionary Ideas to Impacts session.
The star of the conference must have been the hands-on lab, the line was out the door. I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear people skipping lunch or a few sessions to make it into the lab room.
I personally will miss the Birds of a Feather format, but I recognize, as the audience gets larger, there is more value in giving people hands-on experience with new and upcoming features especially with the Developer Co-Pilot on the horizon.
The Ai Angle
We can’t have a conversation in 2024 without also mentioning Ai. The opening and closing keynotes had several speakers talking about Ai and, fortunately, the focus was less about the hype of what we’ll see and more of how Workday and builders alike can work together to deploy Ai responsibly. As Kelly Trindel eloquently put it… “keeping Ai in the loop” instead of the other way around.
From the conversations, I can see Workday’s deliberate approach to investing and embedding Ai features into their product. I foresee the need for each builder within organizations to help decide how far to take Ai across their enterprise.
And beyond investments in Ai, Workday has invested heavily in the last 2 years into the low-code/no-code toolkit and we’re starting to see the fruits of that labor. With Visual UI Mode and copy/paste in Orchestrations (this is bigger than it sounds) each one these tools will help prototype and iterate MUCH faster… decreasing the time to value that the businesses increasingly need these days.
There was more to see, connect, and experience at DevCon so stay tuned for a follow-up diving into the embodiment of what makes DevCon special for Workday Builders each year.
Until then, comment/reply and let me know some of your favorites and takeaways from DevCon!
