Code Europe moves to Warsaw

After nine editions across Tricity, Kraków, and Warsaw, the 2026 edition of Code Europe lands in Warsaw on 15 September 2026, with Day 1 broadcasting online the day before. It's worth being direct about the reasoning.

This wasn't a 2025 decision. We started planning the Warsaw move in 2023, after two editions where the operational picture made the case for us. International speakers were spending too much of their travel time getting in and out of Poland. Attendees outside southern Poland were treating Code Europe as a destination trip rather than a working day. Much of the engineering employer base we work with is concentrated in and around Warsaw. And, to be transparent about it, our own organisation is headquartered in Warsaw too, which puts the team running the festival in the same city as the venue. That removes a category of operational friction nobody on the outside should have to care about, but that we definitely do.

The decision was made in 2023. Execution took until 2026 because moving a conference of this scale isn't a twelve-month job.

What's changing, and what isn't

The on-site day moves to Stadion Legii in Warsaw on 15 September. Day 1 stays online on 14 September, broadcasting CEE-wide.

The three-track format stays in place: AI Engineering & Data, Cloud, DevOps & Platform Engineering, and Software Architecture & Engineering Excellence. The booth and exhibition setup is unchanged. The audience profile holds: 81% of 2025 attendees had four or more years of professional experience.

What changes is the logistical centre of gravity.

Why Warsaw, specifically

International connectivity. Warsaw is by far the most internationally connected city in Poland. Chopin Airport is LOT Polish Airlines' main hub and the entry point for long-haul routes from the Americas, the Middle East, and East Asia. Those are the routes the international speakers we want on Polish stages actually fly. Cutting an extra connection off a speaker's itinerary isn't trivial when you're asking someone to fly in from San Francisco or Seattle for two days.

Domestic centrality. Warsaw sits in the middle of Poland's rail network. Engineers and builders from Gdańsk, Poznań, Wrocław, Łódź, Lublin, and the Tricity belt can reach the venue and return same-day. From Kraków that calculus has always been harder for everyone north of the country.

Employer concentration. Polish tech employers, both the multinationals running engineering hubs here and the local product companies, sit disproportionately in Warsaw. The recruiting and partnership conversations that happen in the booth area on Day 2 are more efficient when the companies and the candidates already live in the same metropolitan area. For a Warsaw-based senior engineer, Code Europe is now a commute, not a trip.

Venue scale. Stadion Legii gives us room to grow the on-site footprint without compromising the experience. We're not chasing 5,000 attendees (the audience profile we built for isn't infinitely scalable), but we want headroom to expand the booth area and the networking moments without crowding the technical sessions.

A note on Kraków

Kraków hosted Code Europe through the 2021 to 2025 editions and was a strong home for the festival. The city's tech community is real, the venues we worked with were excellent, and the audience that traveled to Kraków every year built the foundation everything else stands on. Moving the on-site edition north isn't a judgment on Kraków. It's a choice driven by where our international speakers come from and where our partner companies are based.

A portion of the Kraków-based audience will travel for the on-site day. The fast train between the two cities runs in under three hours; same-day return is workable, and the after-party doesn't make the last train tight. For those who can't make Warsaw at all, Day 1 is online and free of geographic constraint.

Day 1 stays online, by design

Day 1 isn't a consolation prize for people who can't get to Warsaw. It's a deliberate broadcast day: keynotes, panels, and partner lecture slots streamed across CEE, with sessions available live and on-demand afterward. For attendees, it's the broader-reach day before the on-site one. For partners, it's the broadcast surface that complements the in-person recruitment work on Day 2. The two days are designed to do different things; they're not interchangeable.

What this means for partners and attendees

For partners, Warsaw means the conversations you came for happen at your booth, not in a hotel lobby afterward. Candidate density and local employer density both move in your favor.

For attendees, the move means less travel friction, broader speaker access, and a venue built for a single, sharp on-site day.

Speakers get one connection instead of two for most international itineraries, plus a Polish capital with the infrastructure to host an event they'd recommend to their peers.

Tickets and the partner program are open at codeeurope.pl. See you on 14th and 15th September.