Unless you’ve been living under a mousepad, you know about WeAreDevelopers. The Berlin-based software developers conference and networking event, now in its 11th year, attracts 15,000 devs from more than 70 countries to the German capital each July.

You might be forgiven, though, if you weren’t aware that the conference is expanding in 2026: WeAreDevelopers is coming to San Jose, California, in September and Bengaluru, India, in November.

If you ask Sead Ahmetovic, co-founder and CEO of WeAreDevelopers, about the value of the conference — especially as it expands in two directions this year — he’ll tell you firstly about giving developers an overview for building new software. But the second reason he goes a little deeper: WeAreDevelopers is an all-too-rare opportunity for sometimes unsung developers to get together and actually celebrate themselves a little.

“Developers are introverts. I’m an introvert. We are not that loud when we achieve something or build something. But developers build the products that the entire world uses.”
—Sead Ahmetovic of WeAreDevelopers

“We wanted to give the developer community a bigger voice, because the marketing people, the business people, the sales people, the startup people — they all celebrated themselves,” Ahmetovic says. “And developers are introverts. I’m an introvert. We are not that loud when we achieve something or build something. But developers build the products that the entire world uses.”

Thomas Dohmke, the Seattle-based technology executive (he’s now co-founder and CEO of Entire and the former CEO of GitHub), tells The New Stack that one appeal of WeAreDevelopers is it gives developers an opportunity to tell the story behind their work.

“If you can [tell the story of your work to a crowd of developers], then you can not only convince them of what’s about to come and how their life is going to change, but you can also make them one of your biggest supporters.”

Listen to the full interview in the latest episode of The New Stack podcast. Below is an abbreviated Q&A with Ahmetovic and Dhomke, edited for clarity and brevity.

The New Stack: Sead, WeAreDevelopers began in 2015 as essentially a side project. What was the gap you and co-founder Benjamin Ruschin saw?

Ahmetovic: Ten years ago, you had this rise of cool startup events and great marketing conferences — people going on stage celebrating themselves. For me, as a developer, it was not that interesting, because you do not have the hands-on substance. Developer events existed, but they were mostly based on a niche topic — a programming language, a framework. If you want to build great software, you need to bring all the different stakeholders together. And we wanted to give the developer community a bigger voice. Developers are introverts — we are not that loud when we achieve something. But developers build the products that the entire world uses.

The short version is we did a meetup, 300 people showed up, we did it again, 600 showed up, and everything else just happened. There was no real strategy in the beginning.

How did you choose the name? It almost feels defiant — like, “we deserve our own conference.“

Ahmetovic: Could be, but I really don’t know. We brainstormed what domains are available, and everything was taken. But at the end: OK, “we are developers.” That’s what we are. Someone told me, “Do you even know what responsibility you have when you have this name?” But honestly, I think we never really took that too seriously.

Why expand to the US now?

Ahmetovic: People asked for it, partners asked for it. Most of our partners in Europe actually are US-based tech companies. My first reaction was: But you must have these kinds of conferences in North America. We went overseas and looked at a lot of great events, but we saw there is a niche — the vibe, the deep technical content, the hands-on formats — that’s missing. It’s very complementary to the current tech event scene.

Thomas, you left GitHub in August 2025, after leading it past 150 million developers, to become a founder again. What was the itch you couldn’t ignore that pushed you to start Entire?

Dohmke: I was born in the late ’70s in East Berlin, so when the internet boom happened in the mid-’90s, I was too young to participate as a startup founder. But through the journey of Copilot and ChatGPT, I could see we’re in the early stages of another drastic change — like the internet fundamentally changed our lives, I believe AI is such a transformation. All the companies founded now are effectively post-AI — building with AI in mind — and all the companies that already exist have to think about a transformation. I thought that’s an amazing opportunity to go back to that founder lifestyle and build Entire as a new developer platform for these AI-native software developers.

You’ve said GitHub was built for humans collaborating with humans, not for developers running dozens of agents. What does a platform built for that world look like?

Dohmke: GitHub’s landing page is often a repository, which shows you files and folders. Yet most of these files are now written by agents, and almost nobody wants to browse through a file tree — that’s not the artifact you’re interested in. What’s much more interesting is what the developer put as a prompt into the agent. We have to move to the artifacts that are actually relevant: your session logs, your checkpoints — the things describing the idea. They’re the institutional knowledge of your organization, codified together with the code. Those artifacts create the brain of every software project that both humans and agents can leverage.

Five years out — let’s say 2030 — what does a developer’s day look like?

Dohmke: You can check in with your agent the same way you check email and Slack, and feed in three more tasks before you even head to breakfast. But what it won’t mean — we’re seeing this already — is less work. We will feel like magicians with orchestras of agents, but there’s only so much we can process. Those who figure out how to organize will build more and achieve more than ever.

“We will feel like magicians with orchestras of agents, but there’s only so much we can process.”
— Thomas Dohmke of Entire

Ahmetovic: The question I was waiting for is, “Will there be a need for developers?” A developer is someone who builds something. In five years they will still build things — less typing, more thinking, more orchestrating, more talking. The other stuff stays the same: just building stuff.

WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America runs September 23–25. Join us in San Jose, California and get your discounted ticket here.

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