During the years I spent working closely with user group leaders all over the world through INETA I was constantly amazed by the developer communities popping up an growing in countries all over the world. And not only the priveleged North American and Western European countries either. INETA LATAM (Latin America) grew like wildfire. Conferences there were drawing 5,000 developers at a time. I remember being thrilled about the first INETA user group in Poland. Now there 22 in Poland and 23 in Turkey. They are everywhere and it truly encourages you to think twice about what you think you know about the world around you..
And in Bulgaria, a country filled with ancient monasteries and legendary brandy, there is a bustling developer community in Sofia. There you will find the Sofia .NET User Group, the National Academy for Software Development, myriad software courses at Sofia University and the quickly growing and very popular third party .NET component company, telerik. And more and more.
...and a .NET conference in October called DevReach. What's amazing about this conference is that not only will there be presentations by some of the local and regional .NET gurus, but there are a number of U.S. speakers heading over to present at this conference as well! I will be joining Stephen Forte, Ted Neward, Richard Campbell, Cathi Gero, Carl Franklin and telerik's spokesmodel Sahil Malek (just kidding, Sahil) all coming from the U.S. Speakers who are not traveling so far include Goksin Bakir, who is well known to many of us as a Microsoft Regional Director from Turkey and also the lead of INETA MEA, Martin Kulov from CodeAttest who along with Stephen Forte pulled this event together and a slew of speakers I look forward to meeting.
And don't think I plan to pop over, do my talks and head back home. I already have plans to explore as much of this country as I can before I turn ** (true age hidden to protect the innocent) the day after I return home.
So huge thanks to Stephen and Martin as well as sponsors Microsoft, telerik, Bulgaria's National Academy for Software Development (yes, I've said it: “I'd like to thank the Academy!“) and IDG.
Be sure to check back in October for pictures! In the meantime, these are amazing!