800 attendees from 16 countries and 3 continents:
About us
Common questions and answers about the event
- Why should I attend the event?
It will increase your productivity: While you will certainly be attending conference in order to learn, a short work trip away from the office will re-energize you and allow you to work better when you return.
It will be inspiring: A balanced mixture of participants and speakers working in programming, design, marketing and business development. Find partners, colleagues or ideas to develop.
It will make you better at your job: Learning from the pitfalls as well as the successes of distinguished business leaders at Bulgaria Web Summit will help you to find areas in which you can improve.
You will learn more about our industry: What you learn at our event can only serve to bolster you knowledge and fuel you continued drive for success. - Where can I see the previous events?
- 4 stages? How can I see all the talks?
We will try to arrange the program based on topics of interest and without overlapping. Of course there is a great chance that you will have to choose between 2 sessions. In any case you will learn something new and you will also be able to talk to the speaker of the talk you missed later and to ask her/him everything you need to know.
Using the schedule as an excuse not to come is the most stupid one we could imagine. Sorry!
- Are you related somehow to The Summit?
No, we are not. In fact we think the summit is useless as a technology event, but this is our personal opinion.
We do respect the effort of the organizers.
- Why is your event so affordable?
Our goal is to create an affordable event, so anyone could come and learn and gain useful experience and connections. We keep the quality of the speakers very high and we are trying to make your stay at the venue as comfortable as possible.
We also count on our partners to help us with our mission.
- Are you affiliated with the “Bulgarian EU Presidency in 2018”?
We are so proud to announce that we are NOT affiliated with “Bulgarian Presidency of the Council of the EU in 2018”.
Confirmed Speakers
Behold! Some of our awesome speakers
The Web

Ines Avdić-Zekić
She works remotely and has been traveling the world since 2015.
#WorkingRemotely

Neven Boyanov
Entrepreneur and irrepressible startup enthusiast, recently focused on telemedicine.
#eHealth

Bilyana Vacheva
UX team lead for the LensVR browser.
#VR ;#AR.
Voice & VoiceUI

Léonie Watson
Accessibility engineer, W3C Web Platform WG co-chair, screen reader user, tequila drinker and crime fiction junkie.
#AlexaSkills; #VoiceUI

Rafal Kuklinski
Director at Amazon, leading the Text-to-Speech technology team.
#AlexaSkills; #AVS #API
DevOps, Workflows, Processes, Data Quality, ETL

Ilko Kacharov
Zend Framework Certified Architect and Lead Dev in Proxiad/Mailjet.
#CodeReviews

Boyan Djumakov
Web Developer && Hardware Enthusiast.
#WorkBetter

Andrey Hristov
Software developer with 17 years experience. Previously, he was part of the MySQL development team.
#Docker

Marian Marinov
CEO of 1H, CTO of Kyup and Chief System Architect of SiteGround.
#Nginx; #MySQL

Boyan Yordanov
Software engineer, organizer of PHP Varna user group and community fanboy.
#OpenAPI

Pavel Prudky
Prague based Data / BI Developer with 10+ years of experience currently focused on ETL processe.
#ETL #SQL_Server

Roger Robson
_ngineer currently pretending to be a Technical Product Manager and Data Quality Expert
#DataQuality #SQL_Server
PHP

Juliette Reinders Folmer
Juliette Reinders Folmer is an all round consultant and developer who tries not be a geek.
#PHP #PHP_CodeSniffer #RegExp

Milana Cap
WordPress developer at Toptal and Open Source contributor. Former Opera prompter.
#PHP #Wordpress #API

Yoan-Alexander Grigorov
Dedicated PHP developer since 2006. Rascal MPL language engineering.
#PHP #GlagolDSL

Derick Rethans
PHP internals person, author of Xdebug; Works as Senior Engineer at MongoDB.
#PHP #MongoDB
Programming:[Javascript, WebAssembly]

Lian Li
A software engineer and machine learning enthusiast.
#NodeJS; #ML

Roman Kuba
Senior Softrware Engineer at Codeship.
#VueJS

Jessica Jordan
Software Engineer | Web | JavaScript | Ember.js | Berlin
#EmberJS

Krasimir Tsonev
Writer, speaker and coder, designer with more than 10 years experience.
#JavaScript #eHealth

Kaloyan Kosev
Front-end developer, author at CSS-Tricks, part of the DevLabs dream-team.
#react #react-native

Boyan Mihaylov
Web enthusiast, software architect, improviser.
#WebAssembly

Julian Sapundjiev
Hardware enthusiast and Software Developer
#Community; #LoraWAN

Asim Hussain
Developer • Teacher of Angular & JS at codecraft.tv • Cloud Developer Advocate @Microsoft
#Nodejs; #Security

Emil Stoyanov
Blockchain professional
#Ethereum; #SmartContacts

Sebastian Witalec
Solution Engineer and a Technical Evangelist for Telerik a Progres company.
#Native

Svetlin Nakov
Software engineer, technical trainer and entrepreneur, co-founder of the Software University.
#Blockchain #Cryptography

Yasen Yankov
Strong supporter of the Blockchain technology and Cryptocurrencies ecosystem. Works with FinTech in the last 6 years.
#Ethereum #ERC-721
UX

Florence Okoye
UX Designer at The Natural History Museum.
#UX; #ServiceDesign

Dave Hogue
Psychologist and UX Lead at Google who designs for humans.
#UX;

Ina Georgieva
UX Designer. Film Director & Producer
#UX; #Gamification
The Schedule - 14.04.2018
Timing and agenda of event
-
08:45 - 09:40
Check In + Coffee + Networking
-
09:40 - 10:00
The grand opening - it will be awesome!
-
10:00
Alexa Voice Service Under the Hood
Alexa is a speech service behind Amazon Echo. Speech-based user interfaces represent one of the next major disruptions in computing and the Alexa Voice Service (AVS) provides you with an opportunity to take advantage of this new form of interaction. In this session, we’ll walk through the AVS API and go behind the scenes with Alexa, diving into the architecture and unique technical challenges faced during development.
- Rafal Kuklinski
-
10:45
Sharing Code Between Web and Native Apps
NativeScript has opened up a whole new world to Angular developers: the ability to share code directly between your web and native iOS/Android applications. Which is awesome! But, just because you can share code across multiple platforms, doesn’t mean that you necessarily should.
In this talk we’ll first take a look at what NativeScript makes possible from a code sharing perspective. We’ll build a few Angular components and use them both in the browser and on mobile devices. Then we’ll take a step back and look at the same code from a pragmatic, maintenance-oriented perspective. Come for practical tips & tricks on sharing code across multiple development environments.- Sebastian Witalec
-
11:30
Simplicity is not Simple.
Products may be or become complex for many reasons, and teams are often asked to make them "simpler and better." How do we identify when and why something is complex, and how can we make it simpler? We'll talk about methods to make products and experiences simpler, some of the considerations and decisions we may face when tackling complexity, and look at some examples of products that made themselves simpler without sacrificing features and functionality.
- Dave Hogue
-
12:15 - 13:30
Lunch Pause; Networking; Lightning talks;
Eat something, do some networking or use the stage to share something with the rest of the attendees.
-
13:30
The art of noise (keep talking)
Voice interaction is now commonplace: we converse with the digital assistants on our phones and our connected home devices, and the experience is improving all the time. But how do we design experiences for voice interaction? What can we learn from the experiences of using first generation voice input/output technologies like screen readers and speech recognition tools?
Full of practical ideas and interesting possibilities, this talk explores the past, present, and future of voice interaction design; and considers how to create voice experiences that really work.Léonie Watson
-
14:15
The next evolution of the Web
This is a futuristic talk! I will talk about the next evolution of the web - immersive virtual reality websites. I will share our vision on how the browsers have to change in order to accommodate the needs of the new platform and also give valuable insight from the experiments we've done in the field of VR UX.
Bilyana Vacheva
-
15:00 - 15:15
Visit our sponsors. Grab a coffee. Breathe!
-
15:15
There is a lot of buzz around the progressive framework named VueJS. But why is it truly special and interesting?
We’ll take a jump into what Vue does, and what’s its special little features and on this path we’re going to explore what Vue can do for us on parts that are maybe not obvious. The reactive data system that’s running under the hood is often overlooked, but when used wisely enables users to do really impressive things on the way. Come with me on that journey and maybe Vue sparks your interest.
What this means is, we we'll walk through the progressive part of Vue and see how easy it is to get started and how complex it can become. From dropping it into the browser to leveraging webpack with Single File Components. Beyond that we will take a look at the reactive system that's in depth of Vue, why computed properties are so awesome and what we can build with Vue. We will build a rough patch of a State Managment Library (That will eventually be Vuex), components that fetch data automatically, and hopefully more.- By Roman Kuba
-
16:00
Testing against Time in JavaScript Applications.
As the applications we write tests against grow more complex we might stumble into testing errors stemming from asynchronous and time-dependent behaviour. This talk will characterize several roadblocks in testing which are affected by time. With an example Ember.js application, we will explore how Ember's rich testing API, newest JavaScript features and community libraries, will help us writing legible and reliable tests and how we can make those tests turn green even as time passes by.
- Jessica Jordan
-
16:45
Remote Work - Is It For You?
With technology no longer a limiting factor and companies increasingly hiring remote workers, the number of people working outside offices is rapidly increasing. Bring your experiences and ideas to this discussion to explore the present and future of remote work.
- Brian King & Ines Avdić-Zekić
-
17:30 - 18:00
Closing talks. Raffle and more surprises. Be here!
-
08:45 - 09:40
Check In + Coffee + Networking
-
09:40 - 10:00
The grand opening in Musala Conference Room - it will be awesome!
-
10:00
How to hack a node app?
Thought hacking was hard? It’s not, it’s easy and I’m going to show you how! In this episode of CSI Sofia we’ll investigate a series of hacking stories and break them down step-by-step to see exactly how they did it. By the end you’ll walk away a little bit more scared and a lot more prepared with some great practices you can apply immediately to your own applications.
- Asim Hussain
-
10:45
Building scalable web apps for patients
Digital healthcare was and it is still an important part of the healthcare worldwide. Last couple of years many companies invested in developing solutions that enhance the efficiency of healthcare delivery and make medicines more personalized and precise. Come to this presentation to learn what it means to build scalable web apps for patients. We will talk about JavaScript/React. Its ecosystem and how it helps to deliver sustainable software.
- Krasimir Tsonev
-
11:30
How technology helps therapists connect and work remotely with their patients
What Firebase, wearable devices and WebRTC have to do with the medicine? Often after a surgery patients have really hard time finding the rehabilitation services that they need. Although it sounds like a healthcare system problem it is sometimes caused by problems that could be overcome by technology. Traditionally the healthcare industry is slow to adopt modern technology but the rehabilitation and tele-rehabilitation in particular give us an opportunity to innovate a bit more aggressively.
For the past couple years we’ve been developing a solution in the fields of telemedicine that utilizes a real-time database such as Google Firebase, uses smart wearable devices such as smart bracelets and watches to collect valuable data, real-time audio-video communication such as WebRTC to connect people over the Internet. In this lecture we will discuss some of those technologies as well as some of the problems specific for the industry.- Neven Boyanov
-
12:15 - 13:30
Lunch Pause; Networking; Lightning talks;
Eat something, do some networking or use the stage to share something with the rest of the attendees.
-
13:30
React Native App: Expectations vs Reality.
I had a chance to be part of a team that started developing a decent size React Native mobile app from scratch. As a developer with a solid React background, I had some expectations at first. During my initial research, everything sounded terrific: performance stats, ease of development, learn-once-use-everywhere, debugging tools, etc. But is everything terrific really?
I'm excited to share my journey about how my expectations met the reality. I'll give my personal opinion about the matureness of the technology, for which use-cases it fits well and for which it doesn't. I'll also try to address the most popular misconceptions about React Native, which front-end developers usually have before they have the chance to actually built something.- Kaloyan Kosev
-
14:15
Machine Learning in the browser with deeplearn.js
Even if you've never done anything with machine learning, you have probably already heard that it's very powerful, adaptive and will change our way of thinking about computing forever. But how can you, a web developer, who's never been interested much in statistics benefit from the ML hype? In this talk I want to give you the tools to build a small self-learning application that runs completely in the browser.
Lian Li
-
15:00 - 15:15
Visit our sponsors. Grab a coffee. Breathe!
-
15:15
Modern practices for securing your web applications.
Marian will present practices for securing your web apps and static content by utilizing latest http security headers and dns records.
Marian Marinov
-
16:00
Speeding up and automating your development routine with Docker.
Containerisation is taking over the world. You will how Docker containers are different from virtual machines and how you can use them to make your life much easier when writing web (and not only web) applications.
- Andrey Hristov
-
16:45
How to build your own anycast service (and why)
In this talk Marian will share with you what is anycast, what you need to know in order to build your own anycast setup and what services can benefit from it. Finally he will show you how you can cheaply setup your own anycast.
-Marian Marinov
-
17:30 - 18:00
Closing talks in Vitosha hall.
-
08:45 - 09:40
Check In + Coffee + Networking
-
09:40 - 10:00
The grand opening in Panorama hall - it will be awesome!
-
10:00
Blockchain Cryptography for Developers
Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), secp256k1, private keys, public keys, addresses, ECDSA, hashing algorithms, digital signatures.
- Svetlin Nakov
-
10:45
Building non-fungible tokens with Ethereum ERC-721 – overview
- What is a crypto collectable (non - fungible asset on Ethereum).
- What are the use casese and possible products around NFTs.
- What is ERC721 – standard for building non-fungible tokens over Ethereum
- Overview on ERC721 and building a simple non-fungible token
- Building a simple smart contract on transferring non – fungible tokens
- Where and how can we earn or buy crypto collectables / assets.- Yasen Yankov
-
11:30
Bulding Decentralized Apps
While creating a decentralized app is certainly fun, there are some peculiar details which you need to have in mind when considering the architecture of your project. In the form of an open discussion Emil Stoyanov will share his experience with building decentralized applications and will go through the process of creating Dapps based on Ethereum blockchain and decentralized storage technologies like IPFS. The discussion involves the basic principles of operation of a blockchain and how it intergrates with the existing web technologies, but does not require any prior knowledge about how Ethereum or other decentralized solutions work.
- Emil Stoyanov
-
12:15 - 13:30
Lunch Pause; Networking; Lightning talks;
Eat something, do some networking or use the stage to share something with the rest of the attendees.
-
13:30
WebAssembly brings the Web to a new era.
JavaScript has become the de-facto programming language for the Web. It allows developers to build from traditional single-page applications to more specialized ones, for example, video and image manipulation. Although possible, applications like CAD, games, and video are hard and sometimes weird to write in JavaScript. Moreover, such applications often need to be rewritten from the scratch from other statically typed languages, as the code cannot be reused directly on the Web.
WebAssembly is a low-level binary format running the browser. It allows developers to create highly efficient applications, where performance is close to native. WebAssembly is a new compilation target for the Web, allowing us to compile from C/C++ and other statically typed languages. Furthermore, it creates a standardized base for reusing code between Web and native. In this talk we will examine WebAssembly and discuss how it is going to change the Web.- Boyan Mihaylov
-
14:15
Beyond Documentation with OpenAPI.
Imagine a world where the mobile development team is not constantly surprised by changing endpoints, where frontend developers don’t abuse your carefully crafted APIs and we don’t have to go back again and again to fix or change stuff. In this imaginary land we are able to leave the guesswork out by using API definitions to produce even better designs and automate parts of the process. Together we will explore OpenAPI as a standard way to describe APIs and see how it can help us get there.
- Boyan Yordanov
-
15:00 - 15:15
Visit our sponsors. Grab a coffee. Breathe!
-
15:15
The Big "Why Equal doesn't Equal" Quiz
So you think you know PHP ? But do you really ?
We all compare and test data on nearly every other line in our code, be it input validation, an if-statement, a switch or determining what to display and how. So of course we are all experts on how to do these tests and comparisons…. Or are we?
No matter whether you are a beginner or an expert, come and join in the fun for the Big “Why equal doesn’t equal” Quiz, test your knowledge and learn about defensive programming and the quirks of a loose type programming language along the way.Juliette Reinders Folmer
-
16:00
Glagol DSL experimental language.
Glagol DSL is an experimental domain specific language with the goal to help developers engineer microservices using the Domain-Driven Design concepts out-of-the-box. To achieve this, Glagol DSL incorporates object-oriented structures that are much closer to the concepts of Model-Driven Design (a set of patterns from Domain-Driven Design) than the usual object-oriented languages. Additionally, Glagol DSL also supports basic web (api) framework capabilities like routing, request handling and controllers.
Glagol DSL includes grammatical declarations for Entities, Value Objects, Repositories and Controllers. In general, all of those are embedded into the language’s syntax and their usage implies follow-up rules based on the concept behind each of them.Yoan-Alexander Grigorov
-
16:45
Storing Data in MongoDB
Although MongoDB is a non-relational database, it is still very important that you store your data in an optimal way. This presentation teaches you the basics of MongoDB and its data model, how to design your data schema according to your application's needs, and how to keep your data clean.
Designing for a modern non-relational database such as MongoDB requires a different mind set when designing your schema.
Besides schema design techniques, we'll also have a quick look at indexes, and way to find out why queries are potentially not as fast as they could be.Derick Rethans
-
17:30 - 18:00
Closing talks in Vitosha hall. Raffle and more surprises. Be here!
-
08:45 - 09:40
Check In + Coffee + Networking
-
09:40 - 10:00
The grand opening in Vihreh hall- it will be awesome!
-
10:00
Game principles in design
“Man…is only fully a human being when he plays” - Friedrich Schiller.
Game is a constant part of human nature and can be seen in almost every facet of civilisation: war, religion, politics, sports and arts. It is an activity executed within certain limits of time and place, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is different from “ordinary life”.The play-mood is a social impulse that conveys meaning to certain actions and is a source of intrinsic motivation for the player. We will analyse the anatomy of a play and will discuss how to smartly use game principles in products in order to keep and guide users interest.Ina Georgieva
-
10:45
Understanding the Job to Design the Service.
What does it mean for design to be intersectional, for development to be inclusive? What does it mean to be a designer in an era of rapidly changing complexity? Combining insights from the jam methodology, user centred design and jobs to be done framework, this talk will explore how we can incorporate uncertainty to create adaptive personas where the objective and the personal meet.
Florence Okoye
-
11:30
Building a global internet of things network together.
The Things Network is building a network for the Internet of Things by creating abundant data connectivity, so applications and businesses can flourish. The technology we use is called LoRaWAN and it allows for things to talk to the internet without 3G or WiFi. So no WiFi codes and no mobile subscriptions. It features low battery usage, long range and low bandwidth.
- Julian Sapundjiev
-
12:15 - 13:30
Lunch Pause; Networking; Lightning talks;
Eat something, do some networking or use the stage to share something with the rest of the attendees.
-
13:30
Get your ETL flow under Control using 3sigma limits.
I would like to demonstrate how to use this simple statistical rule to capture outliers represented as invalid file loads in your etl process and pass them as documents into elasticsearch.setup will consist of Sql server hosting your etl Logging database, scheduled, stored procedure calculating The empirical rule and raising events into The windows event Log ,winlogbeat passing these events to elasticsearch and also kibana will be used for visualization. During The presentation, I would like to show how to get this setup running on your local machine to try out and talk further about The pros / cons of this solution.
Pavel Prudky
-
14:15
Data Quality by Design
How do you define Data Quality? I certainly had trouble when I faced that same question for the first time. Twelve months later, I feel I have a grip on it, and as we prepare to roll out a plan to address it across our organization, I’d like to share with you a way of looking at, analyzing, planning and implementing a plan for data quality improvements.
Roger Robson
-
15:00 - 15:15
Visit our sponsors. Grab a coffee. Breathe!
-
15:15
WordPress REST API when you're not WordPress developer.
WordPress REST API has many use cases. We'll take a peek at possibilities to interact with WordPress from the outside.
Milana Cap
-
16:00
Practical code reviews
Code quality / style / standards
Error detection
Sharing know-how with the team
Vulnerability exposure
Iterations and passes
Review vs running the code
Goals, checklists and metrics
Code review toolsIlko Kacharov
-
16:45
Working the right way by knowing all the wrong ways.
Software development is a strange mixture of work and art. We do not only write code, but we make art as writers create their masterpieces. Your habits reflect on your daily work and shape how you approach new tasks. The main problem of bad habits, aside of wasting your time and lowering your motivation, is that rather often you don’t even know about them. I will talk about bad habits by sharing with you all of the bad practices that I remember from my past and current projects. I will talk about what helps me write better, what motivates me and what prevents me from doing so. I will tell you how I started with Delphi, PHP and JAVA, how I hated JavaScript and how I love it now. We will even briefly talk about DevOPS and how I had to develop a torrent client in Python. I’ll share how I manage to learn new things, despite my uncanny laziness for reading.
Boyan Djumakov
-
17:30 - 18:00
Closing talks in Vitosha hall. Raffle and more surprises. Be here!
Questions? Call us!
+359 894 29 66 19
The Venue: Inter Expo Center
147, Tsarigradsko shose blvd, 1784 Sofia, Bulgaria
+359 2 965 522 0.
Our awesome (no kidding) partners.
Main Partner

SuperHosting.BG is the largest and the fastest growing hosting company in Bulgaria. They are the most popular choice for a hosting partner in the country – their quality of service, exceptional customer
care and 24/7 technical support are the features their customers value the most.
Platinum Partner

Founded in 1998,Milestone Systems is a global industry leader in open platform IP video management software
Gold Partners

Mansion TOC is the Technological and Operational heart of the world renowned MANSION Group - an Online Betting Global Leader, operating leading Online Casino brands such as: Casino, MansionCasino and SlotsHeaven. If you are a Full Stack
Developer, looking for a new challenge – come and join us where the world plays!

Toptal is an exclusive network of the top freelance software developers, designers, and finance experts in the world. Top companies rely on Toptal freelancers for their most important projects.

SoftServe is transforming your business with innovation, experience design, security, big data and analytics, and software development
Silver Partners
Green Partners
We at BWS take protecting the environment *very seriously* and we are grateful for the support of the following green companies:
Amazing Partners
Pricing
Flexible pricing for your needs. Team discounts available.
The Final Frontier II
- Access to 4 conference stages
- Lots of knowledge
- Lots of fun
- Bring your own food
VIP
- Access to 4 conference stages
- Lots of knowledge && fun
- A Lunch box
- A gift
Workshops
- Access to 2 workshops
- Lots of knowledge && fun
- Hands-on experience
- UX and JS
Important: If you have troubles paying via our partner website (which is in Bulgarian) - sabitie.bg, please send us an e-mail to 2018@bulgariawebsummit.com and we will help you out.
News and Job offers
Important Updates

We are green.
We at BWS take protecting the environment and global warming very seriously. During our last event we had bio-degradable lanyards and now we are aiming at going even further to make our event a zero-carbon event.
Some rules we will follow
– Request organic, locally produced food and beverages to cut transportation emissions. Organic food and beverages do not use synthetic fertilizers or chemicals derived from fossil fuels.
– Eliminate disposable containers, plates, bowls,
cups and cutlery.
– Set up a compost program for all food waste. Composting reduces the amount of waste going to landfills and cuts emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
– Choose suppliers that provide low-carbon products or
services.
- Carbon offsets will be used to offset all emissions, including those from air travel, energy use (including electricity), vehicle use, etc.

Take your kid with you.
Every year there are several children whose parents haven’t been able to arrange a granny-nanny and have had to bring their child to the event with them. This year we will try to end the kiddie-boredom and paperball matches which usually take
place in the dining area by organizing some activities for our youngest attendees:
Learn how to hack
We will organize a programming workshop for children aged 6-12 where they can learn how to start programming
and/or to share their knowledge with the rest.
Have fun
Apart from that we are planning to hire an animator to make sure the children have fun while you are busy learning new modern web techniques from our speakers.
Your kid will get this for free if you purchase a conference ticket.

Job offers
Browse the job offers from our sponsors and start a new challenge:
<Front End/> Developer by Mansion TOC
Senior Software Engineer - Frontend by Leanplum
Product Manager by Leanplum
Software Development Engineer - Alexa Automotive by Amazon