We spent a Saturday in May at the Albanian Developers Conference in Ulqin, third edition, as speakers. The stage sits inside Kalaja e Ulqinit, the old fortress above the sea, which is an unreasonable place to give a technical talk and exactly the right one.
We used our slot to introduce the company and how it began, which at that point was a short story. Then we demoed the thing we actually wanted to show: Programo ne gjuhen tende, a hybrid programming book for children, in Albanian. Most material that teaches a child to code assumes the child already reads English. That assumption quietly decides who gets to start.
Copies of the book went to the Museum of Ulcinj, so the demo now sits in the museum archive. Not a metric anyone will put on a slide, and still the part of the weekend we talk about most.
The rest of it was the afterhours. Speakers who had no reason to spend their evening advising a new company did exactly that, in detail and without being asked twice. That is the part conferences in this region do better than the ones with larger budgets.
Thanks to Flaker Imeri for organising the event and backing us, to Ardijan Mavriq for the hospitality, and to Ervin Kalemi for advice that was more useful than he probably realises. See you at the next edition.
