Workday DevCon 22 and Beyond!
Over the last few years, Workday has greatly expanded the technical tools available for customers to design and develop automations and custom employee experiences. These technical solutions sit alongside the Workday core product providing a seamless parity between custom experiences and Workday-delivered experiences.
With this big bang of tooling, there’s a growing need for a connected developer community to form around this new universe of solutions… this is where DevCon shines as a beacon along the developer journey. Read on to hear about my experiences at DevCon22 and get a perspective of what DevCon means to us designers and developers.
The Early Years…
DevCon has been an evolution over many years starting with the early hackathons and partner-only events. I’ve been doing Workday Hackathon’s since 2014 when Workday first opened up hackathons to implementation partners. I signed up for the Hackathon with co-worker and we flew over to one of Workday’s offices in San Francisco. There, for 24 hours, Workday employees and partners sat around tables brainstorming and idealizing a better integrated world of Workday.
Little did I realize that these Workday employees weren’t just folks from the field readiness organization; they were also Workday product developers creating tooling for developers. A hallway conversation with a teammate complaining of a REST API ignited a deeper discussion with a product lead showing them the challenges we were facing and sharing ideas to improve it.
This experience of collaboration and growth is the seed that would grow into what DevCon would become.
The Magic of Flocks That Stay Together
The magical union of product designers and product users working together has only grown since those early days. With ever-increasingly ambitious hackathons all the way to DevCon22, this union has not disappointed in terms of the number of product teams available to mingle with. A key series bringing people together was a series called, Birds of a Feather.
Tables were set aside in the conference that allowed attendees to sit down with speakers from selected sessions to dive into specific topics along with other like-minded people…think Brain Dates but much more focused on learning and imagining Workday possibilities. Together, as a group, the table shared perspectives and feedback to improve a particular feature or topic. I found myself staying at one table an additional 30 minutes talking with a developer experience engineer almost missing the after-hour events. Those after-hour events were a mix of fun, food, drinks, and most importantly people.
It’s Never Not About People
It’s about the people not the technology. Yes, the DevCon featured 35+ sessions running 2 parallel at the same time over two days across a wide variety of topics from an all-star cast of speakers (me included! 😉) … but the moments that made the biggest impact were the ones listening to the stories of people helping people, connecting with old friends, and making new ones. It may seem sappy, but these connections help drive the intent of what DevCon is about…. bringing everyone together to take stock of where we’ve been and where we can go.
Another highlight for me was the Developer Hub. The hub was a live helpdesk stocked with product teams ready to assist customers and developers alike in any issue or question they have about the Workday technology. The newly announced Developer Forum will emulate this helpdesk-type of support where developers, customers, and product teams form a tightly knit community of people helping each other. And talking of coming together to build, there was the obligatory Hackathon which capped off the DevCon.
Hackathon Live!
For the Hackathon, Workday prepared 14+ brand new features for hackers to play with during the Hackathon. Although I always enjoy a good hack, I had pre-existing commitments preventing me from attending the whole hackathon. Before hopping onto my flight, I attended the opening ceremony and was thoroughly impressed with the planning and thoughtfulness in ensuring every team was clear on goals and supported during the Hackathon. For the closing ceremony, I was a fan of being able to watch the stream and chat virtually with others across the ecosystem to cheer the finalist teams. The Workday team and the event staff did an amazing job running the whole DevCon.
To sum it up, the in-person DevCon22 is a milestone event for the Workday cloud platform that’s been culminating over the years. I also see it as a bright beacon to bring people and a wide variety of perspectives congregated under one roof. Together, getting mastery on the tools to build and helping builders focus on building.
