The Craft international software developer conference has been held by IBM Budapest Lab and Prezi in Budapest in April of every year since 2014. The aim of the increasingly popular event is to showcase the latest – theoretical and practical – innovations and technologies forming essential parts of the tool-kit used by any successful software developer (or company).

This year, the conference was hosted at the Magyar Vasúttörténeti Park (Hungarian Railway History Park) between 25 and 28 April, with more than 25 workshops held on the first two days at various locations in Budapest, while the last two days focused on sessions at the aforementioned, wonderfully unique location. This year saw the largest Craft event to date, drawing almost 2,000 visitors from 46 countries, all coming to learn from the best lecturers and practical experts in the software developer community.

This year, we were present as platinum sponsors at Craft, where we also announced a surprise challenge: our programming competition proved to be at least as popular among participants as the freshly-squeezed orange juice on offer at our booth. Many attendees were also very interested in our self-driving Mercedes C200 model, which we used to showcase our developments with self-driving vehicles.

On the second day of the conference, as part of the “Eclipse/ToolMakers’ Day” workshop, Gergely Pintér, the Head of AUTOSAR and the Fail-Operational Platform Department, as well as Máté Kovács, one of our highly talented software engineers, gave lectures to Hungarian and international participants in the topic of “Model-Based Development and Code Generation for Automotive Embedded Systems”.

As part of Craft 2017, an opening exhibition under the name of ‘Street of the Future’ was open for viewing on 22-23 April in Madách tér in downtown Budapest. The goal of the free and open event was to present the latest innovations by Hungarian high-tech firms, and to make these innovations shaping our future available to all. In addition to our booth, the exhibition also allowed visitors to inspect the vehicle showcased at the Craft event, and naturally our colleagues were happy to talk about our newest results, offering interesting facts to children and grown-ups alike.

Who knows, we might even get to welcome some of those sparkling eyes to our company in just a few years’ time!