From September 23 to 25, we sponsored TDC (The Developer's Conference) in São Paulo, one of the largest tech conferences in Brazil, with around 10,000 attendees and a largely senior crowd. We had already hosted and sponsored meetups in São Paulo, but this was the first time Howdy had its own booth at a conference in Brazil.
It didn't feel like a debut. A lot of people already knew us.
A booth with trivia, giveaways, and people we got to see again
The booth was open all three days. Anyone who stopped by could play our tech trivia, take home a giveaway, and grab a photo with the Howdy props. Even the booth's QR code had its moment: one attendee told us he loved it.
The best part was seeing familiar faces. People who had been at Howdy Game Day, the Golang SP Meetup, and the Sou Java Meetup came by to say hi, and many of them brought colleagues to meet the team. The connection with the Java and Go communities was especially strong.
Before the event, we ran a ticket giveaway on social media and gave tickets to developers from our community. One of the people who received a ticket stopped by the booth to introduce herself and thank us in person. Those who attended with our tickets praised the quality of the tracks and the content.
Darío Macchi opened the AI & Emerging Tech track
Darío Macchi, from Howdy, gave the first talk on the AI & Emerging Tech track. The idea was to go back to AI fundamentals at a time when more and more code is written by AI and reviews keep getting shallower. The underlying question: what constraints do we need so we can trust what AI generates?
During lunch, the organization encouraged discussion and the sharing of experiences in English. Darío spoke with everyone at the table, and in fact, one of them continued talking with him later in the Expo area.
A daily mentorship on personal branding
On each day of the event, Darío also ran a personal branding workshop for developers at the Mentorship Hub. It got more praise than anything else we did. Three attendees wrote about the mentorship in public posts or messages, and one summed it up like this: "It took me 10 minutes to be sure that choosing Dario's mentorship was the correct choice (and also to turn into a personal fan of the man)."
The conversation kept going after the event. Darío replied publicly to the people who wrote about it and offered to keep helping, someone asked us for the slides by DM, and another attendee told us they plan to put the mentorship advice into practice and follow up with us.
What we heard in other talks
Between activities, Darío sat in on other tracks and came back with a few ideas worth sharing:
- Claudio Lopes, cloud advocate at Microsoft, put it in a line any senior developer will recognize: "Our lives have changed a lot, our profession has changed a lot since 2022."
- Dayane Felix de Freitas and Paula Fernanda R. T. Carvalho talked about quality with a simple formula: "shift left + shift right = shift everywhere." They also argued that production is a space full of opportunities for QA. The talk left Darío with a reflection of his own: "For 25 years I've been hearing that we can't test everything and that we have to prioritize by risk. And we still struggle with it!"
- Urânia dos Santos Reis, Principal Quality Consultant at Keeggo, was direct: using AI can't be about hype. It has to be systematic, not driven by impulse.
- Marcel Carvalho Manfio and Petrus Batalha explained how Bradesco uses AI across the whole development cycle, not just to write code. Their point: with AI, writing code is fast, but deciding what to build is still people's work. That's why they found the most value at the start of a project, with a process that includes meeting transcriptions, a PR/FAQ (describing the product as if it were a launch announcement), a throwaway prototype, and only then the spec.
Several of these talks landed close to where Darío's did: AI speeds up the code-writing part, and what's left to figure out is the judgment to decide what to build and when to trust the result.
What TDC left us with
After the event, LinkedIn filled up with thank-yous for the giveaways, comments about the booth activities, and people mentioning they had met Darío and the team in person.
We came to TDC with a booth for the first time and left with the feeling that we already have a community in São Paulo. By the end of day three, Howdy was on a lot of people's minds around the venue, and not just because of all the rubber duck caps we kept spotting in every room. Some of those people met us at a stadium or at a Go meetup, others while playing trivia at the booth. We'll keep running into them, quite possibly with a duck on their heads.
