For the 8th time in a row, we gathered the web community in Rovinj to spend the last days of August engaged in workshops. While the essence of the event remained, there were a few novelties that spiced-up our story a bit.
Facts and figures
The event was held in Rovinj from 28th to 30h of August with 5* Hotel Lone as our venue once again. Our partners Boye&CO held CMS Experts group meeting on Monday and Tuesday, while we officially gathered on Tuesday evening during our Welcome Drinks event.
130 attendees from all over Europe participated in 22 workshops divided into 4 tracks – JavaScript, PHP, Symfony and Project Management.
Congrats to Sergei Kriger for being the top-rated speaker on JS track, as well as to Kevin Dunglas and Stefan Priebsch, the best speakers on PHP track.
We replaced eZ with Symfony track, and considering your interest before the event as well as the positive feedback after, this was the best way to go. In the next few weeks, we’ll upload all the Symfony workshops to our YouTube channel so stay tuned :-) We are especially looking forward to sharing the full video of Christopher Hertel’s workshop called Symfony Forms in Detail. Excellent performance and useful tips brought Cristopher a 5,0 rate from the participants and the Best speaker award this year. While waiting for Symfony track to be uploaded, you can watch our most popular workshop from #websc 2018’, Symfony 4 best practices by Nicolas Grekas, with 3000+ views and 50+ likes by now.
Introducing the PM track instead of UX enabled us to get a wider spectrum of participants, not limited to the web community, which added a variety to our event. Considering the results on our voting app, what occupies us the most is “how to be twice as productive and still leave the office early”. Peter Taylor answered the question and won the best feedback within the PM track. Congratulations!
In addition to workshops, the roundtable on Wednesday powered by free beers from 5th Element and unconference on Thursday provided the opportunity to all our participants to exchange thoughts and experience in the informal setting.
Summertime, Funtime
We all know that #websc is not just learning. The important part of our event is providing opportunities to mingle and extend a business trip to vacation.
While for most of us days were starting with coffee and snacks in front of the Lone conference halls, a small group of early raisers joined our Ivo and Lora for morning recreation before breakfast. Running through 100 years old forest in front of the Hotel Lone and swimming after that was definitely the best way to start the day... If you are not a night owl like some of us :-)
While the participants were attending workshops, their companions had a chance to discover the attractions of Istria accompanied by our guide.
Although it was the end of summer, we enjoyed quite a hot weather all the time so we took full advantage of being situated on the Croatian coast. Dinner on Katarina Island and Swim&Chill afternoon on Friday came as a perfect refreshment and another opportunity to enjoy magical Mediterranean scenery with other participants and companions.
It was great to see that the hanging out and mingling didn’t end after the official part of the programme. Warm summer nights provided the ideal opportunity to do as Croats do – have a drink, chat, play the guitar and sing by the sea.
In your opinion
After organising the event for 8 years in a row and after spending last months fully engaged in preparations, we are definitely not able to review it objectively. That’s why we appreciate you took your time to fill the questionnaire we sent and provided us with valuable feedback. Here’s what you said...
- 98% of the participants said they would recommend Web Summer Camp to others, and 49% of them heard of #websc from a friend
- 93% think they could apply the information presented at the workshops to their work
- 4.8 was the average for the organization during the Camp
- Web Summer Camp overall got an average of 4.66
Thank you also for providing us with interesting propositions for the future. We are already working on a few of them for #websc 2020.
We never walk alone
All of this wouldn't be possible without the help of our dear friends from Salsa Adria Productions and generous support of our sponsors AWS, Prime, Netgen Layouts, Keyteq, CJW Network, Infolox, CodeRhapsodie, Q-Software, Mozilla, thePHP.cc, Les-Tilleuls.coop, Cloudflare, Ultima and Sticker Mule.
We thanked them with the Piece of the sea, a sculpture created by talented Croatian designer Luka Mimica.
What’s next?
Although the #websc 2019 has just ended, there are already many things on our mind on what to improve next year. Considering the fact that each year around 30% of our participants are #websc alumni, we are thinking about introducing some greater novelties for our summer adventure 2020.
We’ll keep you posted regarding that through our social channels. For regular updates, sign up for the newsletter or follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Thank you all for joining us for this summer journey. Hope that the people you met and experience exchanged during the whole Camp will help you and your business grow.
Stay tuned!