1. Why did you accept our invitation?

Jessica: I’m always really excited to see and hear about what different tech centres are doing right now. There is so much incredible talent and so many great projects coming out of Romania right now that I couldn’t pass up the chance to come along!
Valentin: I think that DevTalks is a wonderful event. I’ve participated once before and it was a great experience.

2. What is your message for our audience?

Jessica: What I would love to really drive home for more technologists is the importance of empathy and a willingness to explore others’ perspectives is in technology. It’s so easy for us to get caught up in the newest tool or framework that we often forget that we’re humans, building for other humans.
Valentin: I would encourage them to be open to new technologies, new ideas and new experiences. The tech world keeps moving at incredible speed, and we, as developers, can’t afford to be living in the past.

3. How will the future look for developers in 2020?

Jessica: I think that the near future of development will have to create more space for hobbyist and independent developers to engage with the industry to account for the next generation of highly tech literate young people coming of age. I hope that we as an industry use this expansion to become more connected to each other, our end users and our communities.
Valentin: I suspect that developers will be doing pretty much the same thing, but with new technologies and maybe new programming languages. It seems that AI will be a major change for the industry. Also, Virtual Reality seems be this year’s hot new tech, just like Internet of Things was for the previous years. Even though none will live up to the hype, I think they will have an important place in the tech world of the 2020s.

4. What are the most used technologies within your company’s activities?

Jessica: We’re big PHP fans, having just rebuilt our platform in Laravel for our 2.0 release. We use Swagger for documenting our generated APIs and a load of different paid and open source projects to keep the development and other teams working happily together.
Valentin: Mozilla is one of the major browser developers, so it support a range of platforms. So we get to work with C++ on Windows, Mac and Linux, Java on Android, and Swift on iOS. Sure there are lots of other technologies involved, but the most important is the web platform in general. You can build anything on top of the web nowadays. Especially since Service Workers were developed.

5. How does your company contribute to the growth of the local IT community?

Jessica: DreamFactory is a company focused around and deeply committed to open source and community development. This year we’ve launched a massive outreach campaign that has us out and chatting with community members at events like DevTalks. We’re also working to support more technologists getting into open source through the development of tutorials, workshops and sponsoring Rails Girls SoC this year. Our core product, an open source platform for REST API development has always been free and open source.
Valentin: Mozilla is a big supporter of Open Source technologies. Not only does financially support a big number of open source projects through the Mozilla Grants, but also participates in Tech meetups, fights for net neutrality and is the main supporter of the Rust programming language.

6. What are your thoughts and expectations regarding your participations at DevTalks Bucharest 2016?

Jessica: I’m really just hoping to learn more about what folks in Romania are working on and really interested in right now to be better able to carry those messages home to our engineering team to be sure our open source API generation platform is on the right track!
Valentin: I expect it will be a fantastic event, with awesome talks, great booths and as usual great people.