Registration / Coffee / Breakfast / Networking

Make sure to arrive early enough to register on time. Have your Ticket QR ready. Pick your Badge and lunch token. Grab a coffee and some treats. Great time to network and visit our Sponsors' and Communities' booths

Introduction / Welcome

Warmup: Small Talk live: Junior software engineers in the era of AI code assistants

Friday 22.Nov

THEME: AI

Let's warm up for an amazing conference. Join Paris Kasidiaris and Antonis Kalipetis on the first morning of the conference for a Small Talk (Mikri Kouventa in Greek) on the role of junior and software engineers in general.

Keynote: The Zen of Programming

Friday 22.Nov

THEME: SW Craftsmanship

A personal journey toward writing beautiful code
Ever since he wrote his first lines of code in 1982, Sander Hoogendoorn has been fascinated by the beauty of some code and the pure evil of other code. In these 40 years, Sander has worked with hundreds of developers. He has written code in many different paradigms, languages, ecosystems, and frameworks, always searching for better, more elegant ways to solve problems.

Is there really no silver bullet? Should you follow principles or intuition? Does architecture help or block you? Can frameworks kill your projects? How solid is SOLID? Why DRY? When is your code conceived? What is beautiful and what is ugly code? Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder? Functions before objects? What are monads and should you apply them? Is small beautiful? Does unit testing make debugging obsolete? And why should you take your mother out more often?

During this inspiring new talk Sander Hoogendoorn, lifelong developer and currently CTO at e-commerce company iBOOD, investigates his personal journey through platforms, languages, principles, doubts, and struggles that so many developers also encounter during their careers, illustrating ideas and patterns that influenced and inspired him to how he currently codes. Fully functional, monadic, single-lined, clean, short-named variables, and automatically tested code – of course with real-life code examples.

Get inspired to discover your Zen and find your own path toward writing beautiful code.

Yodeck Platinum Sponsor Speech: Unlocking the Power of Web Workers: Optimizing JavaScript Performance for Modern Web Applications

Friday 22.Nov

As web applications grow increasingly complex, ensuring smooth user experiences becomes crucial. JavaScript, while powerful, can suffer from performance bottlenecks when tasked with heavy computations, leading to unresponsive interfaces. Web Workers provide a robust solution by allowing developers to offload intensive tasks to background threads without blocking the main UI.

TAGS: #web-applications #ui/ux #web-workers #intensive-tasks

Coffee Break

Grab a coffee and some treats. Great time to network and visit our Sponsors', Communities' and women-led-initiatives' areas.

Unpopular Opinions About Software Development

Friday 22.Nov

THEME: SW Craftsmanship

Design patterns, the relevance of tests and use-cases, agile methodologies, microservices architecture, separation of backend/frontend concerns, and serverless computing are indeed topics commonly discussed among developers. However, these discussions can sometimes be polarized or influenced by personal biases and experiences. It's essential for any developer to approach these topics with an open mind, considering various perspectives and evaluating them based on their specific context and requirements. The talk presents opinions backed by facts a bit out of the ordinary and mainstream.

Leverage LLMs in Java with LangChain4j and Quarkus

Friday 22.Nov

THEME: AI

In this session, we’ll explore how to infuse AI capabilites into Java applications, using LangChain4j and its Quarkus integration. We’ll start from the Quarkus DevUI where you can try out AI models even before writing any code. Then we’ll explore LangChain4j features such as prompting, chaining, and preserving state; agents and function-calling; enriching your AI model’s knowledge with your own documents using retrieval augmented generation (RAG); and discovering ways to run (and train) models locally using tools like Ollama and/or Podman AI Lab. In addition, we’ll take a look at observability and fault tolerance of the AI integration and compile the app to a native binary.

Lunch Break / Networking Sessions

Use your token to pick you lunch box @ Open Space. Great time to network and visit our Sponsors', Communities' and women-led-initiatives' areas.

Measuring UX for Monitoring tools

Friday 22.Nov

THEME: SW Craftsmanship

During this session, we'll investigate strategies for assessing the user experience of observability tools. We will be exploring essential UX metrics, various research methodologies and key instruments employed to establish a baseline and benchmark the iterative implementation of new functionalities over time. The focus will be on a user-centered approach, covering aspects from early incident detection to mitigation, to ensure a comprehensive evaluation of user experience quality in observability platforms.

INTRALOT Gold Sponsor Speech: Can there be pr(AI)vacy, after all?

Friday 22.Nov

In this speech, Spyros will delve into the complex relationship between artificial intelligence and privacy. He will examine the potential risks AI poses to personal data and privacy, while also proposing solutions that allow for innovation without compromising data protection. His talk will highlight how privacy can be maintained in an increasingly AI-driven world.

TAGS: #ai #data-privacy #data-protection

101 Digital Product design

Friday 22.Nov

THEME: SW Craftsmanship

Are you interested in starting your career in the tech industry? Wondering about the stages of digital product development and which methods or tools we work with to evaluate user needs & behaviours, specify user flow, craft interface design and test processes? Then, don't miss this talk and the chance to learn more on how to build meaningful digital products from scratch and create unforgettable user experiences.

TAGS: #Product #UI/UX

Coffee Break

Grab a coffee and some treats. Great time to network and visit our Sponsors', Communities' and women-led-initiatives' areas.

Causal Machine Learning for the Real World

Friday 22.Nov

THEME: AI

In our era, Large-scale AI has made significant strides, mainly focusing on static, high-quality data. Yet, transitioning AI to the real world poses challenges due to its dynamic, complex nature, which defies simple categorization or static modeling. Addressing these complexities is crucial for advancing towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). This requires a shift towards Cyberphysical AI, which integrates with the physical world's dynamic and causal complexities. My team's work on Causal and Dynamical Learning aims to tackle these issues, illustrating the direction AI must take.

TAGS: #Causality #MachineLearning #FoundationModels #ComputerVision

XM Gold Sponsor Speech: Beyond the IDE: Introducing AI Tools in our Development Flow

Friday 22.Nov

In this presentation, we will explore how AI tools have changed the software development process in our company, extending far beyond the capabilities of traditional Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). We’ll delve into the practical applications of AI in various stages of development, from code generation and auto-completion to bug detection and testing. By integrating AI, developers can enhance productivity, improve code quality, and streamline workflows, allowing them to focus on more creative and complex tasks.

TAGS: #Product #UI/UX

Revisiting user registration and authentication

Friday 22.Nov

THEME: SW Craftsmanship

Anyone that has written any kind of App will be faced with the problem of how to register users and authenticate them. But user registration and authentication is boilerplate while implementing your idea. It is not your core domain, but a supporting domain that needs to exist.

So you either implement something very basic or rely on the framework that you use to provide it to you. And while there are a lot of alternative solutions (SSO, OAuth etc), almost always this default build-in authentication mechanism will exist for years to come.

But we can do better! In this talk we will discuss about two cryptographic protocols:

- Proof of Work (PoW) and

- Zero-Knowledge Password Proof (ZKPP),

that can be used to help us with user registration and authentication. Using those protocols we can enhance our authentication mechanism and have a very robust solution, more secure than most available implementations inside frameworks.

Both protocols are not new and are widely used: PoW in cryptocurrencies and ZKPP in password managers, but in this talk we will discuss on how to combine them and strengthen not only the authentication but also our entire solution.

TAGS: #cryptography #authentication #authorization #PoW #proof-of-work #ZKPP #zero-knowledge-password-proof

Coffee Break

Grab a coffee and some treats. Great time to network and visit our Sponsors', Communities' and women-led-initiatives' areas.

Hack The Box Gold Sponsor Speech: PENDING

Keynote: The Way of Cloud Native AI

Friday 22.Nov

THEME: AI

We will delve into the magic world of LLM training and inference using cloud native and open source tooling; we will explore how the current GenAI revolution benefits from open standards, programmable infrastructure and the powerful paradigms of cloud native. We will expouse practical knowledge on how and why running AI/ML workloads on Kubernetes and end up with a short demo.

TAGS: #Kubernetes #CloudNative

Day Closing

Get a brief Day closure and a chance to win the big Prize !

After Party with Live Music / Networking

Let's have a great After Party @ Open space with snacks, dinks and music. Our skilled DJ will make sure you have an amazing time. Great time to network and have fun.