A wonderful experience visiting Bucharest and Romania for the first time in my life. The experience was way above my expectations as there were so many positive things about the trip.
The conference “DevTalks2026” itself was huge, so many stages, talks and different vendor stalls in two days. The organizers Larisa Adelaida-Dima and Silvia Alupului and their team did a massive job in all the arrangements, coordination and making sure the speaker experience was smooth. I really cannot thank them too much.
I was fortunate in the conference itself as my dear colleague from Finland, Pekka Pönkänen was also a speaker in the event and as Pekka had already been in the conference previous year, he was familiar with all the details and it was really easy just to follow his lead. Pekka also had with him few of his local colleagues Radu Nituc and Roxana Petrila who were so friendly and helpful during the whole conference. Radu driving us around and Roxana enlightening us with any details about Bucharest, Romania one could ever wish to understand. The dinner at the local medieval restaurant was also a feast one cannot forget.
It was also really nice to meet fellow QA speakers, Chris Armstrong from Wales, Masut Durukal from Belgium and many many others. The feeling of QA speaker community was wery warm indeed but of course, there were also other speakers I was fortunate to meet and hear talk, e.g. Laura Trotta from ITaly, Tom Colvin from UK and many others.
In addition to the conference I was fortunate to be able to join a local testers meetup Tabara De Testare, organized by Mr. Andrei Pirvulescu. The meetup planning actually started already in January as I found Andrei with assistance from my international QA colleagues. The meetup itself was very warm and cosy, very similar as to how our own FTMG meetups in Finland are. I gave a talk in the meetup and it was nicely received but of course the discussions over pizza and 0% beer were nicest after the talks.
My LinkedIn post about DevTalks2026 presentation + some more pics here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikko-paloheimo_devtalks2026-paloheimoqamentorworks-paloheimoqa-ugcPost-7468257254421749760-tWxK/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAC6UPIsBC-TZxoHNVm7pq6RtM6TJKJridIM
You can read and check some nice pictures on my LinkedIn post about Tabara De Testare here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikko-paloheimo_communities-softwaretesting-qualityassurance-ugcPost-7468527021413883907-EMmQ/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAC6UPIsBC-TZxoHNVm7pq6RtM6TJKJridIM