DevDay is an in-house technology conference organised, presented and attended by Entelect’s own people where the technologist, inventor, hobbyist, engineer or artist in you can come to the fore. The event is part showcase, part science show, part geek club, part makers club; offering a range of lightning talks on cutting-edge technologies, as well as a variety of interactive exhibition stands where people can discover the latest creative innovations in technology.

The first event took place in 2014, and as the company has continued to grow, so has our conference. DevDay 2019 celebrated its fifth birthday and is now hosted twice a year in both our Western Cape and Gauteng offices, with over 550 people in attendance. Our next steps would be to replicate this conference in our European and New Zealand offices.
The topics this year were better than ever, and catered for all our engineers and also our non-technical people. A few of the presentations included:

• How to be a 10x ninja rockstar developer
• Mentoring and influence
• An image is worth 1000px
• Going passwordless
• Driving design convergence using web components

Our Tech Accelerator judging also takes place during DevDay, as well as a bit of competitive game jamming in the middle of the show. The Tech Accelerator is a platform to work on pet projects. Pet projects can be incubators to new businesses, social initiatives or even just building something as an excuse to play around with cool new tech. Projects are completed over the year, and during that time we host a series of hackathons where the pizza flows, ideas are shared, projects are accelerated, and trolls are attacked with Nerf guns.

The point of the Tech Accelerator is to learn, so the idea and IP belongs to the participants and not Entelect. The projects are evaluated on several categories such as technical innovation, cool factor and utility.

We’re already looking forward to all our next events in 2020!

Watch our DevDay video at https://culture.entelect.co.za/stories/entelect-devday/