Devconnect Argentina 2025

I had the opportunity to travel across the world to Buenos Aires in Argentina to attend Devconnect 2025, the biggest Ethereum event worldwide happening November 17th-22nd, all thanks to the Scholars program.

I learned about the program from Riely, since Geodework was managing the Community track of the Scholars program. My activities around both the js13kGames and Gamedev.js communities fit perfectly, as we have Decentralized category in the first one and mostly blockchain-related Challenges in the second one since 2021. On top of that, Scaffold-ETH was supporting the Gamedev.js Jam all the way back in 2022 already, and Geodework did the same for the recent js13kGames competition in 2025.

Preparations

After being accepted into the Scholars program a few months before the actual event happening in November, we’ve attended bi-weekly calls to learn about each other, both as a whole group of almost 100 people, but also within a given category: Legal, Artists, Journalists, Community, and Other Builders.

I did a short, 5 minute talk about js13kGames and Gamedev.js communities I presented to our group at one of the calls.

Travel to Buenos Aires

My flight from Warsaw to Buenos Aires was going through Paris - it was all in the early morning, the first leg was delayed due to heavy fog in Paris, and so… I missed my connecting flight.

I was originally suppose to land Sunday before midnight which was late already, but now it was going to be even worse. The next flight I was offered was suppose to be the next day, so I’d arrive Monday before midnight and miss the whole first day with the keynotes and Scholars meetup included.

Luckily enough, we’ve found a connection through… Bogota. There was literally one last seat available for the only flight departing that day able to take me to Buenos Aires. What was even more funny was that Paul was flying from Canada to Buenos Aires through Bogota as well. The weird part was that there were TWO flights departing from the Bogota airport to Buenos Aires within 20 minutes of each other, both arriving to Buenos Aires within 10 minutes of each other, and we were NOT on the same flights. It was even the same local company. I obvously wanted to change my booking to join Paul’s flight, but we learned eventually that his was landing in the city centre on the Jorge Newbery Airport (AEP), while mine did so on the outskirts of the city on the bigger Ministro Pistarini International Airport (EZE).

So, I flew from Paris to Bogota, had another delay and ran through the Bogota airport, caught up with Paul to have a 5 minute chat, then had issues boarding the plane as my return flight wasn’t even flying through Bogota in the first place, so their system wasn’t allowing me to board the plane, but it worked eventually. So, Warsaw to Paris to Bogota to Buenos Aires, and after 30 hours with only one or two hours of sleep total I landed Monday morning, 6 AM. Last stretch was 1 hour drive from the airport through traffic to arrive in the hotel.

Fun fact about Air France, since it was my very first time flying with them: instead of a stewardess asking if you want to drink anything (water, soda, etc), they were asking if you want to drink champaigne specifically instead.

Hotel

I’ve stayed at Hotel Palermitano, which didn’t even look like a hotel from the outside, more like a home or fancy office, given how small the front facing part of the building was. Inside it was a really comfy place, with three floors of rooms. Many Scholars were also booked there, so we had the opportunity to have a chat during breakfast.

Interesting thing about the hotel was that they didn’t give you any key - instead, you’d scan a QR code, confirm your WhatsApp account and receive a code via a message that you’d then use on the keypad next to the door to your room to enter.

The whole Palermo Soho neighbourhood was really nice, with many fancy restaurants, but also lots of graffiti on many buildings. I had about 20 minute walk from the hotel to the venue, which given the perfect weather was such a relaxing thing to do each day.

Venue

La Rural was HUGE. So many buildings, one bigger than the other. I thought GitHub Universe held at Fort Mason was big. Years ago I was at BrazilJS in Porto Alegre with about 1 000 attendees and thought nothing bigger is going to happen for me, ever. La Rural this year hosted about 20 000 attendees, so you can imagine the scale of the event.

There were so many building to visit, with countless activities, side conferences and meetups, with even more happening outside in random places of Buenos Aires, either right next to the venue or across the city.

Beside planning to attend the Scholars sessions I’ve decided to follow as many web gamedev related events as possible - good thing I was hanging out with Paul Gadi, Austin Griffith led the BuidlGuidl activities, and Nejc Košir was hosting the Gaming District, so there was plenty of opportunities to meet and chat with fellow devs.

Monday

After arriving from the airport I’ve left my bags in the hotel room and had a quick shower to refresh after a 30 hour trip, and then met with Paul - we had a quick walk to the venue to hopefully make it for the opening keynotes.

We did eventually, even though there was a huge line at the entrance not moving for at least 15-20 minutes.

Monday was Ethereum Day with Opening Ceremony in the morning, including a talk from Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum. The first part of his talk was surprisingly basic, explaining what ETH is, but the second part went into the near and far future for the cryptocurrency and the whole ecosystem, which was way more exciting.

In the meantime Paul had his Cryptogames Retrospective talk on the Lightning Stage in the next pavilion, and given most of the space had booths, the talk’s audio was streamed directly to the headphones available on every seat. Quite an unusual experience, but worked pretty well.

After that we went around La Rural checking out all the booths, or at least those in the pavilions close to us given how big the whole venue was. We also visited the Gaming District to check on Nejc and the games showcased there.

Later in the early evening I’ve attended the Scholars session where we talked about us: where we’re coming from, and what we expect to get out of Devconnect.

There were various meetups happening in the late evening, but I was so tired after the long trip that I returned to my hotel room and went to sleep almost immediately.

Tuesday

Next day in the morning we went to check the Gaming District again and hang out with folks there for a while.

After that me and Paul decided to join the BuidlGuidl’s Bootcamp - started with Austin Griffith’s general intro, the Speedrun Ethereum intro in particular, and a talk about stablecoins. Most of those things you can read on Speedrun Ethereum’s website, but I figured it’s a good opportunity to catch up on the topic as I haven’t played with blockchain development for some time now.

After the sessions we had stumbled into a barbeque with some solid meat selection and went for the grilled meat sandwich, which was delicious. There were lunch options provided by the conference organizers, but they invited food trucks as well, offering a bigger selection of options. Plus, you could literally pay for your food with crypto, which was awesome on itself.

We’ve decided to join 1confirmation meetup in the evening which was happening in a venue close to our hotels. Wearing my js13kGames t-shirt was the way to go as I bumped into a guy who knew the competition and we talked about it for a while. Also, Paul had his own js13k on him as well, so we needed to take a pic together for posterity.

Wednesday

We’ve started the day with another BuidlGuidl session, this time about prediction markets. After that the usual visit to hang out with the Gaming District folks happened.

Next on the schedule was joining the ETHGlobal Demo Day close to La Rural, but it turned out to be a super tiny coffee place with micro booths at the top, and a whole lot of people trying to get in, so after spending a few minutes there we went out.

Returning to La Rural we’ve decided to go through the park, and it turned out to be… a botanical garden. Jardín Botánico Carlos Thays had free entry, so we decided to spend some time chilling there past lunch.

After checking it all out, on our way back to La Rural, we’ve decided to enter another park, which ended up being… a zoo. Again, free entry, so with no specific plans for the next hour or two we went straight into Buenos Aires Eco-Park. It was quite an unusal zoo, given among flamingos or giraffes there were monkeys jumping around, capybaras in every pit, and parrots flying everywhere.

My allergy kicked in so hard though, given in Poland in November the pollen season is already over and I was rightfully out of my medication, while Buenos Aires offered a truly summer weather and a whole lot of pollinating trees and flowers. I had running nose and was sneezing like crazy for the rest of the day, but still was happy we did leave tech sessions under the roof the enjoy the outside world with sunny weather, beautiful plants and trees, and exotic animals.

Last event of the day was BuidlGuidl’s one again: Austin ran a small hackathon around his Max Extract game. I vibe coded some of the tasks with Cursor absolutely not knowing what I was doing, but still ended up around the third place after all, which was pretty amazing.

Thursday

The next day started with another BuidlGuidl session, this time about Farcaster Miniapps.

We’ve quickly registered and joined NoirCon 3 afterwards, but decided to go to StarkConnect taking dedicated bus to a far away venue as it offered a few gamedev related talks.

First the Loot Survivor author was presenting about his project, then a panel of experts including Dojo and Cartridge folks talked about fully on-chain games. The final talk of this event for us was the overview of gaming on Starknet led by Tarrence, co-founder of Cartridge.

We ate lunch there, and then went back to La Rural to hang out around the Gaming District again. I then went for two Scholars sessions (our Community, and then the whole group). It was raining the whole day, exactly the one when we decided to move between venues, but it wasn’t that bad after all.

The evening revolved around the Speedrunners Get-Together where we talked with the BuildGuidl folks, and having my js13kGames t-shirt on helped me find another fan again. Hearing the question “oh, you made a game for js13kGames?” and seeing his face light up when I answered with “no, I’ve created the thing” was priceless, and we had really cool conversation afterwards.

Moments like those, when “random strangers” at tech conferences know about this very niche competition for web game developers, help me keep it all going and brighten my day.

Friday

We’ve started Friday attending Trustless Agents Day as Paul wanted to see a few talks, while I prepared and sent the Gamedev.js Weekly newsletter issue.

Next stop was the ETHGlobal venue as Paul and his friend Jayden went to hack on their digicam project. I registered in the morning, but since I never participated in ETHGlobal before I wasn’t accepted immediately and had to return to La Rural, and then went to my hotel room.

Saturday

Since I did get the acceptance email eventually, I went to join both Paul and Jayden at ETHGlobal, but decided to vibe code a game myself instead of teaming up with them on their project. I was thinking of using Phaser’s Beam first, but it pivoted from “Phaser Editor on steroids” outputting code to “gamifying playable shorts” video sequences, which unfortunately didn’t fit my requirements anymore.

I’ve dusted off my Enclave Phaser Template and launched GitHub Copilot, since I have the Pro+ account for being in the GitHub Stars program. Since Game Off’s theme was “waves”, and I wanted to have as simple controls and core game loop as possible, I experimented with one of the ideas I had: endless runner with a beaver, Bober River Flow, where you navigate the animal swimming in a river and try to avoid incoming logs.

I spent literally only a few hours on this, so it’s nothing more than a proof of concept or a 0.001 version, but wanted to publish something, anything after so many years of not releasing a single game. I also attempted to participate in the Celo challenge to be eligible for ETHGlobal itself in the first place, but failed miserably as I had no idea what I was doing most of the time anyway, and the integration part didn’t actually work.

Wearing another js13kGames t-shirt helped again as more folks knowing about the competition approached me and we had a cool chat about web games in general. It’s incredible how it all plays out, so I’m definitely going to continue wearing js13k shirts at more events.

Saturday evening was all about relaxing after a busy week as I’ve booked La Cabrera in advance earlier to taste argentinian steak before flying back home to Poland. The restaurant was literally a few blocks away from my hotel, which I didn’t even knew when booking the table. Me and Paul both enjoyed the food and the atmosphere of the place a lot - I think it was the best steak I had in my life, or at least one of the very best for sure.

Sunday

My flight was suppose to be late in the evening, so after stuffing myself with a lot of delicious food the day before, I decided to go for a walk. The weather was perfect, so I wanted to get as much sun as possible before flying to a dark and cloudy place called home, that’s why I ended up walking for 2 hours straight and doing 10 kilometers from my hotel to the famous Obelisco.

The rest of the day was spent packing and going to the airport.

Travel back home

Fortunately enough, traveling from Buenos Aires to Warsaw through Paris went smooth without any issues this time. I’ve arrived late evening and was greeted by my wife and daughter at the airport.

Summary

Being invited to Devconnect 2025 as a Scholar was truly an incredible opportunity - this was a huge event full of awesome people, I had so many inspiring conversation throughout the week. We had great weather (even the raining days were super productive), delicious food (I’ll remember that steak for years), and wonderful people (I spent most of the time with Paul, and I’m really thankful to Austin and Nejc for delivering massive amount of gaming content I could enjoy).

The whole concept behind the Scholars program is amazing, big thank you goes to Riely for inviting me, Perrie for handling all the calls, meetups, and logistics, the rest of the team and everyone involved, and of course all the Scholars for being a lovely group of people.

The Artifact

After attending Devconnect, each Scholar is expected to create an artifact:

A free-format creation that expresses their learning and experience in the medium of their choice. It could be a lesson learned, a new project, or just reflections - the value of the artifact is in the act of creating it and sharing with others.

The easiest for me would be this very blog post, but I publish such recaps from the events I attend anyway. So, given I was invited because of the js13kGames and Gamedev.js communities, I thought it would be fitting to go ahead and prepare a dedicated Ethereum challenge in the upcoming Gamedev.js Jam 2026 happening in April next year, since we had Decentralized category and challenges in both since 2021, and we never had this particular one before.

I’m really excited to see how it all goes, especially since a new program just appeared: ETH Stars, resembling both Mozilla Tech Speakers and GitHub Stars - I’d love to be involved, one way or the other, given years of my experience in both. Maybe there’s even a chance to grow OP Guild as part of that, who knows!