Awesome conference – Game of Codes – Niš – 2026
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Introduction
Between the 9th and the 10th of October, I had the privilege of participating to the second edition of the Game of Codes conference in Niš, Serbia.
Since I couldn’t attend the first edition, I decided to participate, and I’m glad I did that. First of all, having Venkat Subramanian and Laurentiu Spilca to the first edition without being affiliated to a major conference event organizer, such as Devoxx, is very intriguing.
Niš
Normally, I’d take a plane to attend a software conference, but since both Cluj-Napoca and Niš are not capital cities, it means you need 3 flights to get there. One option provided by Skyscanner was to fly to Bucharest, then to Dortmund in Germany, only to come back to Niš. So, since Romania and Serbia share a border, I realized that it’s faster if I just drive to Game of Codes, which is exactly how I got there:
The town of Niš is the birthplace of Constantine the Great, who was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity and the founder of Constantinople (Istanbul).
High-Performance Spring Persistence Workshop
On the 9th of October, I ran a 4-hour workshop about Mapping relationships and Fetching data with Spring Boot, Spring Data JPA, and Hibernate.
I was happy to find out that we were sold-out and was pleasantly pleased by the level of engagement the attendees had throughout the training. We covered many more topics besides what we originally planned to.
Conference talks
After the workshop, we had several talks on the 9th of October, followed by a full day of talks on the 19th of October.
One of the first talks I attended was the one about Taste and AI delivered by Tejas Kumar:
I first met Tejas in 2025 when he attended DevTalk Cluj-Napoca and I was looking forward to seeing his presentation.
Another great talk was from Faris Aziz Optimizing UX in Suboptimal Conditions, Dušan Stanojević about Telemetry, Radovan Baćović about Semantic Search, Alessandro Vozza about LLM internals and scaling LLM traffic, and Osip Fatkullin about Ktor, to name a few.
Organizers
When I went to my first international conference (Devoxx France 2016), I already knew several of the organizers from the Les Cast Coders, and the core had tens of people who were taking care of all sorts of aspects of organizing a conference. Well, in the case of Game of Codes, you could count them on the fingers of one hand:
I couldn’t believe that it’s humanly possible to organize such an event, mutinously, with such a small team of organizers.
In spite of being massively undersized, they’ve done an amazing job. As a speaker, I felt like a king. Every night, they organized an event for us, and after the conference, we went to a winery where we had dinner up to midnight.
Special thanks to Milos Stojanovic for inviting me. Here’s a photo with him that we took after the workshop:
I knew that people in the Balkans are very friendly and vibrant, but this event was way beyond that.
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Conclusion
The more popular AI gets, the more important human networking becomes.
Prior to Game of Codes, I had a list of Top 3 conferences that made a huge impact on me, but I’m proud to add Game of Codes right next to some of the best conferences that I’ve attended.
If you have a nice talk that you want to share with a very passionate audience and you’re looking forward to meeting great people, then I definitely recommend you attend Game of Codes in the future.
