Seoul Dev Diary

I wasn’t planning to travel anywhere until September, but plans changed 😅 I’ll be in several cities over the next few months. Let me know if you’ll be around any of these locations. I’d be happy to meet, cowork, or network🤝 @seouldev

Cooking

I survived Monday 😅 🗓 August 19, 18:30 🚀 DevKorea Meetup feat. Qwen See you there! https://luma.com/ssox1jth?tk=iRaV2M @seouldev

Some people fear the dark. Some fear ghosts. I fear Mondays Remote work is fun, they say 😅 But it’s not always fun, coffee shops and flexible hours. Sometimes it’s 7-10 meetings a day 💀 @seouldev

A short but cool video about how we work at Salmon 🚀 7mln+ app downloads. 2mln+ monthly active users. 7000+ partner stores $310mln+ raised 💰 all this in less than 4 years 🔥 as usual, let me know if you're (or know someone who is) a Senior Software Engineer (Kotlin (backend), Flutter, React/NextJS) or a Senior AQA Engineer (TS/Kotlin), I could refer you to Salmon 🚀 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/some-call-manila-home-some-crossed-the-world-ugcPost-7484879584258285568-fuat/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAC3gOPYBTBDgaR1K9sX_rIQU-11bI_fIYpU @seouldev

I’ve just updated ChatGPT and noticed that you can import your chats and projects from 👨‍💻 Claude (not only) into 👨‍💻 ChatGPT. Didn’t expect that. Nice feature if you’re switching between AI tools or just use both 👀 @seouldev

Habsida Hackathon 2026 🔥🔥🔥 Being a mentor at a hackathon is a rewarding experience, especially when the teams you support end up winning prizes. It feels like giving back to the community. Watching people grow, build something cool in just a couple of days, and then celebrate their wins is a different experience 🙌 Another Habsida hackathon in English is coming this September. I’ll share the details as soon as it’s confirmed. 👀 @seouldev

One networking concept that changed how I think about building a career is the strength of weak ties 👥 We often think that our biggest opportunities will come from close friends. In reality, they usually come from people we barely know. An ex-coworker. Someone you met at a meetup. A person you had a short conversation with at a conference. Your close friends usually know the same people and the same information you do. Weak ties connect you to entirely different circles, where new ideas, job opportunities startup partners, and collabs are happening 💰 Many of the biggest opportunities in my career came through these weak ties 📈 That’s one of the reasons I keep organizing and attending tech meetups. You never know which conversation will change your life 🤝 @seouldev

Hiking with fellow expat devs 🔥 I had to learn how to walk the next day after the hike👨‍🦽😂 📍북한산 (백운대) @seouldev

I found out from @anvarbek and @abdurashid that you can get up to 25.4% off your car insurance in Korea if you have a good driving score. Since I pay ~$1,500 a year for car insurance, that could be a pretty good discount 🚗 Well…I will never get it 😂 I don’t think I’ve had a single day without breaking at least one traffic rule. Korean roads are too good to drive obediently ❤️ Of course, the system isn’t perfect and there’s a way to cheat, like using one map app when you’re driving normally and another one when you’re breaking the rules 😅 I got rid of the 빨리빨리 mindset at work, but I still have it when I’m driving 🛞 @seouldev

1 750 000 KRW are waiting for you 👀 sign up for the hackathon (July 17-18) 🔥 @seouldev

Remote side-hustle: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kizzy-kuhn_hiring-korea-developer-share-7480877353645072384-4-9S/?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=ios_app&rcm=ACoAAC3gOPYBTBDgaR1K9sX_rIQU-11bI_fIYpU&utm_campaign=copy_link @seouldev

https://youtu.be/XghLgURx5dY 👀

Nomad visas are easier to get now 👀 the annual income requirement got lower (from ~$74,000 to ~$37 000) More info 👇 https://m.koreaherald.com/article/10801376

The X day 🚀 This event wasn’t supposed to be this big, but it ended up becoming the biggest DevKorea event ever. Out of 2,000+ registrations, only around 400 people could be approved. Even a bigger venue wasn’t enough, there still were way more people than it could fit. It’s been a while since I last learned something new at IT events, but I still genuinely enjoy giving back to the community and helping bring people together 🤝 What started as a small local dev community has grown into something much bigger: Salmon, Supabase. ClickHouse, Figma, Betashares, RevenueCat, OpenAI and many more to come 🔥 Every event gets bigger. Bigger names. bigger crowds, bigger impact. Let’s see who will be the next 👀 @seouldev

👩‍💻 HTTP is getting a new method: QUERY 👀 An interesting addition to HTTP in a while. The purpose is simple: perform read-only requests with a request body. Instead of squeezing a complex search into a URL, you can express it naturally:

QUERY /users

{
  "role": "admin",
  "country": "KR",
  "skills": ["Node.js", "React"]
}

Or search for products:

QUERY /products

{
  "categories": ["laptops", "monitors"],
  "price": {
    "min": 500,
    "max": 1500
  },
  "inStock": true,
  "sort": "rating"
}

The goal is to make complex queries more expressive and read-only. I don’t expect everyone to adopt it asap, but it’s a new non AI topic to discuss (finally 👍). More info: https://dev.to/tykok/the-new-http-method-query-2bec @seouldev

🔥 AI in FinTech Meetup is coming NEXT WEEK! GDG Tashkent is joining forces with top FinTech companies - Salmon and Uzum - to talk about how they're using AI in real software development. 👨‍💻 Lookuut Struchkov • Head of Data Platform @ Salmon • Talk: "Letting an AI Touch Production Data (Without Losing Sleep)" • 17+ years of engineering experience, previously scaling data platforms at inDrive and Agoda, now leading AI-native data engineering at Salmon 👨‍💻 Sergey Chamkin • Senior Backend Developer @ Uzum FinTech • Talk: "How to transform a team’s experience into skills for an AI agent and achieve predictable results" • 7+ years in backend engineering, EPAM → Wildberries → Uzum, now building AI agent capabilities for critical backend tasks, including integrations, observability, and incident analysis 👀 Date: July 9, 2026 🕙 Time: 19:00 🏛 Venue: IMPACT.T 🎟️ Get your FREE TICKET here: https://gdg.community.dev/e/m888ew/ 🙌 See you next week! @gdgtashkent

Some of you might have received the confirmation today. 150 available spots and 1500 signups 🤯 @seouldev

Cooking ⌛️

Bringing some fun to the release😁