The end of October was the second time I went to US to attend GitHub Universe in person after the 2023 edition, and this time was the tenth anniversary of the event itself happening in a new San Francisco venue: Fort Mason.

Last year’s edition had Nova, a mini-conference dedicated to GitHub Stars, which was skipped this time, but other than that we had similar schedule: Day 0 (October 27th) with all the Community and Open Source stuff, and then two days of the Universe conference itself (October 28th-29th).

My travel from Europe went rather smooth, if you don’t count the usual jetlag. What greeted me when leaving the train station I took from the airport was surreal though: a convoy of a few Waymo’s (self-driving cars), followed by Tesla Cybertruck, and a homeless man yelling something about the end of the world in the background.

The next day I had the opportunity to drive a Waymo as a passenger, which was truly incredible. The self-driving car clearly had to went through multiple iterations, because it was driving carefully, but also quite confident. I can’t wait to see such wonders in more cities around the world!

Day Zero

The first, or technically the zero day was held at the InterContinental Hotel in the city centre.

We had the opportunity to hear the big announcements planned for the next day at Universe from the CEO himself, Thomas Dohmke.

It was also a good opportunity to chat in the breakout rooms about all the things related to Open Source with other Stars and GitHub folks.

Day One

The first day of the Universe conference started with the keynote full of interesting facts and announcements. Then we had many sessions in various locations as Universe took place in the whole Fort Mason complex, taking over multiple buildings at once.

There was a huge building entirely dedicated to partners’ booths, which I checked right after the keynote, and attended a couple sessions. Then I went straight to the GitHub Stars Lounge we had for ourselves in the keynote building.

The meetups: CodeRabbit and Figma

Me and a few other Stars decided to visit some meetups happening after the first day of the conference: the first one was organized by the CodeRabbit team, and the other by Figma folks.

We got tired pretty fast though and decided to return to our hotel rooms to get some sleep.

Day Two

The second day of the conference started with another keynote, although with less big announcements. We did have GitHub Game Off mentioned on the stage and a video with the stories from a couple of Stars as well though.

I was at the GitHub Stars Lounge most of the second day - I had one hour shift, but spent way more as we had some cool conversations going there throughout the day.

The food

I definitely can’t complain about the food - we did visit one of the best breakfast places in San Francisco, the Pinecrest Diner, twice!

We also had great ramen in one of the evenings, and visited Little Delhi the other night, where more interesting conversations took place.

The summary

The new venue was great, we had beautiful weather, all the people were awesome. I so much enjoyed my time in San Francisco, it brought our group closer together more than a full year of online meetups.

Spent most of the time with Santosh, but also met Jan, Daniel, and many other awesome Stars. Had really deep conversations as well, I’m definitely gonna remember the Little Delhi discussions with Jan and Jonathan. I had such a great time with Corbin, Emanuele, Gary, Colby, Jess, Rob, Jonah, Simon, Beatriz, Leonardo, and many others I apologize I didn’t mention.

Howard and Anisha did an awesome job creating this wonderful group of genuine people and keeping it together. The only time I felt such positive vibes was the Mozilla Tech Speakers program years ago.

I also had soome time to talk with Lee and play their cool arcade games in person, which always add to the fun people can have at the conference.

If there will be an opportunity to attend Universe next year I’ll definitely do everything to be there again!