4Developers Wrocław 2024 — a day of tracks, corridors, and familiar faces

Tuesday, 5 November — the local 4Developers Wrocław 2024 autumn edition. Several parallel tracks (Application Architecture, Big Data & ML/AI, Cloud & DevOps, Security, and others), registration from 8:00, and the kind of hallway energy the main festival is known for — just closer to home.

My employer sponsored the Big Data & ML/AI track, but the ticket came through a different door: Akademickie Stowarzyszenie Informatyczne at Wrocław University of Technology, where I chaired the board years ago. ASI was a community partner and had passes for alumni. Old student-association contacts still open doors — I am not complaining.

This is not a session replay. I picked a path through the agenda, skipped a block on purpose, and spent part of the day talking instead of sitting. That is how local 4Developers usually works for me.

9:00 — Andrzej Konarski opens the day

After the official opening at 8:45, Andrzej Konarski had the first proper slot — a talk on effective product teams (not flashy ones) as a source of real market advantage. High energy, practical, the sort of kick-off that makes you stop checking the agenda and actually listen. He talked about how product organisations work with topologies — how teams and delivery structures align (and misalign) when you scale — which matched the theme better than yet another “10x team” slide deck.

Andrzej is also ASI alumni, so after the talk we had a short catch-up in the corridor — same circle, different decade, still recognisable problems.

10:00 — Piotr Uzar, Databricks

The Big Data & ML/AI track had two employer slots that morning. I went to the first: Piotr Uzar on Databricks — not only Spark on steroids — at 10:00. By then I was already neck-deep in Databricks from customer work and was lining up my own meetup material on Unity Catalog and Terraform for the months ahead. Refreshing current best practices with someone I had shared projects with was the right use of forty-five minutes — less novelty, more calibration.

The second slot at 11:00 — Michał Bochenek on data mesh — I did not catch; more on that below.

11:00 — Allegro, STRIDE at scale

At 11:00 on the Security track, Piotr Żabrowski from Allegro spoke on threat modeling at Allegro scale — how they moved from STRIDE to something that works in delivery.

Threat modeling is the topic that usually shows up late — after architecture slides are approved and someone asks “did we think about abuse cases?” Seeing how a company that size handles it was useful precisely because it is not how most mid-size projects start.

Nothing in the room replaced reading Microsoft’s threat-modeling docs or running your own diagram session, but it was a good reminder that “we will harden it later” is a choice organisations outgrow.

Coffee, corridors, lunch — networking on purpose

After the 11:45 coffee break I did something I recommend more often than I do: I skipped the next parallel block (and part of lunch) and stayed in the venue corridors instead. Local 4Developers is small enough that you can actually finish a conversation. I ran into people from Wrocław meetups, colleagues I only see on calls, and a few students who wanted to argue about cloud certs. Worth more than another slide deck that day.

13:45 — Ireneusz Tarnowski, modern attack vectors

I came back after lunch for Ireneusz Tarnowski (CERT Orange Polska) on contemporary attack vectors — the mundane ones, like compromised downloads and supply-chain paths, not movie-plot hacking. Concrete abuse patterns beat abstract “shift left” slogans. It paired well with the Allegro session without repeating it — STRIDE as design discipline in the morning block, contemporary attack vectors in the afternoon.

14:45 — Paweł Zubkiewicz, AWS cost optimisation

After the 14:30 coffee, Paweł Zubkiewicz walked through AWS cost optimisation for developers who already have a full plate — practical FinOps habits rather than a finance-team lecture. I live in Azure most weeks; the cloud is different, the principles are not. Idle resources, tagging discipline, and treating spend as a design constraint translate across providers more easily than vendor marketing admits. Sharp talk, even if my day job stays on the other hyperscaler.

15:45 — Piotr Rogala, landing zone in two weeks?

Last session I caught was Piotr Rogala (Microsoft Azure MVP) on whether you can stand up a production landing zone in two weeks. Someone I worked with years ago at the same product company, back when we were both still building features rather than platforms. That scope is also bread-and-butter in my current platform work for customers, so the value was less “never heard of this” and more comparing notes: what he emphasises in governance and delivery order versus what I would push in the same room.

We had time afterward to swap opinions on what “two weeks” really means once networking and identity show up — the kind of conversation that does not fit in a blog post but is why I go to these events.

Would I go again?

Yes. Local 4Developers hits a sweet spot: serious speakers, several tracks, still small enough that hallway time matters. Thanks to ASI for the pass, to the organisers for another solid Wrocław edition, and to the people who stayed for five more minutes after their slides — that is usually where the useful part is.

If you are in Wrocław and missed 2024, watch for the next local date on 4developers.org.pl. The autumn slot tends to land around November.