GameOfCodes 2026: this is why I keep going to conferences

Friday, October 9th. Riding towards Nis with two fellow nerds - peak traffic outside of Skopje, but y’know, what are you gonna do? Weather’s still fine, even though the forecast was all doom and gloom, both for Nis and Skopje. Happily, a trip shared with fellow nerds is never a boring ordeal.

We’re going to GameOfCodes , in Nis. For me, the second year in a row. And this time around, I’m going to a conference to be a part of the audience - no talk to give, no workshop to do, no panel, nothing. Or, so I thought (but more on that later). Milosh , one of the organizers, invited me to come over, so I gladly accepted.

Three hours pass by quickly when nerding over Cloudflare buying Deno, sharing war stories and the likes. Before long, we were in Nis. I really like the vibe of the city - it reminds me of a less gentrified Skopje. It feels like it still has more of an authentic “soul”, so to speak.

We get to our hotels, and next up is out first stop: a networking/speakers dinner sort of thing, waiting for us in a bar near the hotels.

Speaker’s dinner

I have this habit (or non-habit, I suppose), of almost never taking photos. I’m working on fixing that. One of the moments I regret not taking a photo of was exactly this speaker’s dinner bar - a smallish, cozy place, decorated just to my liking. With good beer to match, of course.

After a round of hellos, first I got to catch up with Faris and Tejas . Faris is always a pleasure to talk to - easily one of those people I can spend hours with, talking about anything and everything. We almost always end up towards tech, and more importantly, tech drama, because our industry tends to be a bottomless well of it. I haven’t seen Tejas in about a year. Among other things, he told me about Daiku , this cool new thing he’s working on. Seriously, go check it out - it’s pretty amazing. It’s a really cool concept - browser automation for your agent, that you can take over anytime. Or hand control back. I’m not really doing it justice, give it a try :)

Milosh arrived soon after. He seems a bit tired (no wonder), but he’s fairly upbeat, as usual. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him with a frown, to be perfectly honest, no matter the situation. We spend a bit of time catching up and discussing me taking part in a hackathon pitch at the conference tomorrow. Oh right, that - I still ended up doing something at this one - so my streak of not being “just a guest” continues :D. Long story short, GameOfCodes offered the stage a few groups of students, who had some ideas and built those at a hackathon - so now they get to practice pitching. Sounds like fun, so I gladly accept.

Then, Miodrag showed up. A bit late, for a very good reason - he’s at the conference with his whole family (including a really small baby). Now, that takes courage - I’ve traveled with a toddler to conferences, given talks etc. But a small child AND a baby? I don’t think I’m that brave. Hats off to Miodrag - no excuses, dude showed up and killed it with his talk. More on that in a bit.

Hours pass, beer meter goes up and my night ends up being nerd sniped by Weko - we’re debating tokenizing audio for direct ASR-to-TTS, without converting to text first. I end up getting woken up by the problem and how to approach it during the night. Multiple times. Well, conferences are not for getting some rest anyway, so on we go.

Main day

We thought we’d miss the opening - we were running a bit late. The conference took place at the Science and Technology Park in Nis , and just as we arrived, we got the impression that it hasn’t started yet. Things felt a bit anxious, and after registering, we were told that the we’re running behind schedule because there was a power outage - probably a result of some construction work going on nearby. We’ve dealt with all kinds of issues at WTS, but this was next level - you can’t really run a conference without electricity. Happily, the outage got sorted soon after, and silver linings - we didn’t miss the opening.

I’ll say this - all conferences have their issues, technical or otherwise. It’s how you handle them that makes or breaks the experience. Milosh, Ana and the crew did a stellar job of it.

Talks highlight reel

There were plenty of good topics throughout the day. Here are some of my highlights:

1. Faris’ talk was one of the highlights for me. “Caching, Payloads, and Other Dark Arts: Optimizing UX in Suboptimal Conditions ” covered networks, response times, and strategies for making applications feel fast and responsive when conditions aren’t ideal.

2. Bozho and Weko shared a session on security practices, “Requests, Lies, and Stack Traces.” They covered the obvious things most of us usually ignore, miss, or handwave. Plus, they always put on a show, which makes the whole experience really entertaining.

3. Miodrag’s “Your Data Has a Shape. Does Your AI Know It?” was an informative look at finding relevant information for an AI to use when answering. He covered retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), GraphRAG, which brings relationships between pieces of information into that process, and hybrid approaches.

Pitching panel duty

Three groups pitched in front of us. Pontis pitched an AI-based platform for verifying job candidates and their skills. NERV focused on security for applications built on the Solana blockchain (even though, in all honesty, I know just about nothing about the whole web 3 thing). And bytebridge wanted to bridge university learning with real-world IT work, helping students gradually apply what they’d learned to practical tasks.

For me, NERV had the strongest technical-readiness story. Overall, though, I felt bytebridge had the most prepared pitch and a sound idea. They won both the jury vote and the audience vote.

The rest of the conference

Even though the agenda ran late, it was a nice experience overall. I got to have more hallway conversations, meet some new people, share some new ideas. That’s what community is about - whether there are power outages or any other class of issues. It’s the grace they are handled with that makes it the good experience that it is. What I’m trying to say is - be there next year. It’s as authentic and community as it gets.

The hangout after

We wrapped up the night by heading to an amazing winery outside the city. An authentic place, serving exceptional food and good wine. It feels great to wind down after a long day. The conversation continued long into the night, about anything and everything. It’s exactly the kind of environment where you get to meet the people more than the conference persona. It was an absolute pleasure.

In summary

Obviously, I’m coming back to GameOfCodes. The talks and conversations were worth the trip, and I have a lot of respect for the grace with which that small team handled a difficult day. Support your local conferences, and try some smaller ones. You can feel how much the people putting them together care. Kudos to Milosh, Ana and the team for another great GameOfCodes, and here’s to many more to come 🍻

Stay in the loop

New articles, talks, and the occasional deep cut — straight to your inbox.