“It was tense seeing so many people in the crowds. This year there was record attendance of over 15.000 people. To be honest I felt amazement and fear at the same time, especially hearing people cheering and feeling the energy of such a large crowds. It was hard to relax.”
Mirko Tomić got a message to show up at a backstage at 18:00. Code100 would start at 19:00. By the time he and 40 his fellow challengers put on their competition t-shirts and walked behind the stage, the hall at WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin was already filling up, on its way to a record 15,000 people, the largest crowd in the event’s history.
Setting the scene
Mirko’s Berlin adventure had actually started a day earlier, on the Airstream stage, an open-air stage running alongside the main program. He wasn’t planning to be on it. Christian Heilmann, WeAreDevelopers’ longtime developer advocate and the host of the Code100 competition, and Justin Halsall, an open-source engineer and the event’s regular emcee, pulled him up anyway.
“Christian and Justin asked me to come to the stage and we did a short interview in front of large crowds,” he says. It was his first taste of the scale of the event: “Event was very much developer related, there were talks about multiple emerging technologies, about AI and related products, about the workflows and usage etc. I enjoyed show being very much developer related.”
Between sessions, he picked two workshops out of the full program, and both turned out to be highlights. One was led by Jovana Dunisijevic from Atlassian, on where AI is taking the software development lifecycle “The best SDLC is the one you build yourself: Why orchestration changes everything.” The other was Evgeniya Sukhodolskaya from Qdrant, presenting “The Retrieval Layer in Context Engineering: From Intuition to Implementation.” Around those, they sat in on sessions from Google, Microsoft and Deepsense, plus a talk from Milan Todorovic on agentic features in Xcode and AI in Swift.
The walk to the main stage
“Its not easy to explain in just words,” Mirko says of the moment they got the green light from program director to step out to the main stage. Justin Halsall and Christian Heilmann were already on stage announcing the competition, Christian dressed as a football referee, as the hall kept filling behind them.
“It was amazing experience, being on a stage twice in front of so many people was really new to me. I would love do that again (maybe next year).”
Coding under pressure, on someone else's setup
Once the competition started, the hardest part wasn’t the crowd itself, it was everything around it. “The most challenging part for me was different environment from what I regularly use, regular US layout keyboard, Windows OS, VSCode and one more thing: how to focus on the task when at least 5 cameras are recording you and more than 10.000 people are watching you at the same time,” Mirko says. “Otherwise it was smooth ride.”
That combination of unfamiliar tools, live cameras, a five-figure audience is exactly what makes finishing second out of forty of challengers stand out.
What second place opened up
The result didn’t just end at the scoreboard. “Participating in such a competition and especially making it to the finals and being second, gave me an opportunity to connect with even more people,” Mirko says.
“The next day, multiple people approached me to ask me where do I work, what do I work on, about my experience and also about my thoughts on different topics.” His advice to colleagues weighing whether to enter something similar: “give it a try if you are into such things.”
Looking back, Mirko doesn’t single out the result as the main win, it’s everything that surrounded it. “I enjoyed every bit of it, I attended some amazing workshops from Qdrant and Atlassian and also few more lectures about different topics from Microsoft and also about mobile, I had a chance to speak with people from NVidia, Google, Microsoft, Atlassian, BrightData and few other large companies.”
He also got an early look at where Atlassian’s agentic development tools is headed “a sneak peak into future of agentic development integration in Atlassian products and to try it out” and came home with tickets to the next WeAreDevelopers event, in San Jose.
Talent That Shows Up Under Pressure
Moments like this are a direct read on the level of engineering talent behind Levi9’s delivery teams. Mirko competed live, under time pressure, on unfamiliar tooling, against a global field, and walked away second out of 40 challengers, while also bringing back first-hand insight from multiple companies on where AI-driven development is heading next.
Combination of competitive-grade technical skill plus a genuine appetite to track and absorb what’s next in the industry is exactly what clients get access to when they work with Levi9 engineering teams.
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