DevFest Cyprus 2024

We are excited to welcome you to DevFest Cyprus 2024! 
Mark your calendars: on Saturday, 14th December, 9 am to 5 pm.

Main Organizers: Google Developer Group Cyprus and University of Nicosia. 

Partners: Women TechMakers Cyprus, QBeat Academy and Pale Blue.

Discover the latest AI, machine learning, cloud computing, and web development trends. Connect with industry experts, share knowledge, and build lasting connections.

Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting your coding or technology journey, DevFest Cyprus has something for everyone. Don't miss this chance to level up your skills and be part of a vibrant developer community!

This year's DevFest global theme is Responsible AI. We will be exploring the possibilities and discuss how we can build and use AI in a fair, ethical, and responsible way.

Agenda
◾ 9:30 - 10:00 | ☕️ Registrations & Coffee

◾ 10:00 - 10:15 | Welcome Note 

◾ 10:15 - 10:45 | Breaking the Mold: Building Privacy-First Scalable Solutions Amid Cloud Limitations at Malloc, Liza Charalambous PhD (Co-founder and CTO of Malloc)

◾ 10:45 - 11:15 | Intro to Building and Deploying an Agent with Reasoning Engine in Vertex AI, Ankur Roy (Solutions Architect at Online Partner AB)

◾ 11:15 - 11:45 | ☕️ break (30 min)

◾ 11:45 - 12:15 | Untangling the Past: Tackling the Challenges of Legacy Code in a Cloud-Native Era, Zenonas Kyprianou (CTO of Factory39)

◾ 12:15 - 12:45 | From Zero to Developer in One Year: How to Change Your Career and Work Remotely, Antonia Symeonidou (Coding Tutor, Influencer & Game Development Team Lead)

◾ 12:45 - 14:00 | 🍲 Lunch

◾ 14:00 - 14:30 | Inside the Jinius Tech Stack: Triumphs, Trials, and Takeaways, Angelos Constantinidis (Senior Developer)

◾ 14:30 - 15:00 | Progressive Delivery Made Easy with Argo Rollouts, Carlos Sanchez (Principal Scientist at Adobe Experience Manager)

◾ 15:00 - 16:00 | 🍲🍻 Networking

Entry is free. Registration is required. Grab your ticket now!

The Jean Monnet (M-203) amphitheatre is here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/BZmvVbkyzcwKAsLy8

Agenda

9:30 AM: Registrations & Coffee

Arrive early and enjoy your morning coffee with fellow developers!

10:00 AM: Kick-off, welcome note

We all gather in the conference room to kick-off the tech talks!

10:15 AM: Breaking the Mold: Building Privacy-First Scalable Solutions Amid Cloud Limitations at Malloc - Liza Charalambous PhD, Co-founder and CTO of Malloc

To be truly innovative, one must embrace the unknown and overcome numerous challenges. At Malloc, we've navigated a journey marked by ambitious experimentation—trying to implement features without knowing if they were even feasible. We've faced the complexities of building core new features while simultaneously growing our customer base, managing the creep of maintaining monolithic applications, and making the investment to transition to serverless. Additionally, we've had to weigh the cost of cloud infrastructure and ultimately make the decision to go on-device for greater efficiency. Despite these efforts, truly scalable applications are still constrained by cloud provider limitations, making it a continuous challenge to stay ahead of the curve. Throughout this journey, our goal has remained steadfast: to build a beyond state-of-the-art, privacy-preserving application. This talk will share how we built solutions from scratch, navigated these challenges, and upheld privacy in every decision we made. If you’re curious about creating scalable, privacy-first solutions and want insights into cultivating an innovative mindset, this session is for you.

10:45 AM: Intro to Building and Deploying an Agent with Reasoning Engine in Vertex AI - Ankur Roy, Solutions Architect at Online Partner AB

Reasoning Engine (LangChain on Vertex AI) is a managed service that helps you to build and deploy an agent reasoning framework. It gives you the flexibility to choose how much reasoning you want to delegate to the LLM and how much you want to handle with customized code. You can define Python functions that get used as tools via Gemini Function Calling. Reasoning Engine integrates closely with the Python SDK for the Gemini model in Vertex AI, and it can manage prompts, agents, and examples in a modular way. Reasoning Engine is compatible with LangChain, LlamaIndex, or other Python frameworks.

11:15 AM: Coffee Break

11:45 AM: Untangling the Past: Tackling the Challenges of Legacy Code in a Cloud-Native Era - Zenonas Kyprianou, Cofounder & Managing Director of Factory 39

Legacy code often forms the foundation of critical systems, yet working with it presents a host of challenges. This talk delves into key aspects of maintaining and modernizing legacy software, including strategies for understanding and untangling convoluted codebases, effective testing techniques for previously untested code, and approaches to refactoring while preserving what works. We’ll also discuss the complexities of integrating or migrating to new technologies and how to leverage modern tools to enhance performance and monitoring.

12:15 PM: From Zero to Developer in One Year: How to Change Your Career and Work Remotely - Antonia Symeonidou, Coding Tutor, Influencer & Game Development Team Lead

How to transition into a career as a developer within a year, even if you're starting from scratch. Learn the essential and how to find remote job opportunities in the tech industry.

12:45 PM: Lunch Break

2:00 PM: Inside the Jinius Tech Stack: Triumphs, Trials, and Takeaways - Angelos Constantinidis, Team Lead at Jinius, Bank of Cyprus

Explore the journey of building Jinius, a greenfield project, using a tech stack that blends orchestration and choreography design patterns for microservices. Discover the unexpected challenges we faced and the lessons learned along the way

2:30 PM: Progressive Delivery Made Easy with Argo Rollouts - Carlos Sanchez, Principal Scientist at Adobe Experience Manager

Progressive Delivery makes it easier to adopt Continuous Delivery, by deploying new versions to a subset of users and evaluating their correctness and performance before rolling them to the totality of the users, and rolled back if not matching some key metrics. Feature flags and Canary deployments are some of the techniques in Progressive Delivery, used to roll out new versions gradually.

For containerized workloads running on Kubernetes it is very easy to adopt Progressive Delivery using Argo Rollouts. At Adobe Experience Manager we are deploying over 10k non Adobe customer services to Kubernetes. New deployments can occur multiple times per day from internal changes or from customer code, which can be very different from one customer to another. A new feature or piece of code can work fine for 99% of customers but still affect the other 1%, and being able to detect this from just tests is a very costly process.

We will show how to implement a Progressive Delivery pipeline with Argo Rollouts to improve the reliability of the service and prevent regressions, making decisions based on metrics or AI models. It allows the protection of the service and automation of roll backs to a previous version if needed. This allows for faster delivery with more confidence so regressions are less likely to affect a customer.

3:00 PM: Networking!

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Hosted By

Andreas Loizou, GDG Organizer

Maria Stylianou, Engineering Manager

I'm an engineering leader, passionate about building stuff, experimenting and failing fast. My expertise lies in up-skilling developers and scaling tech organizations. I advocate for increasing diversity in tech, and creating truly inclusive and fun environments.

I consult tech organizations to increase their efficiency, with trainings (via HRDA), team facilitations and individual tech coaching. I'm also building Sequela, an early-stage startup on a mission to decarbonize health institutes.

Hit me up for a challenge, advice or coffee!

Andreas Lefkatis, GDG Organizer

I am a Greek Cypriot Software Developer passionate about Web, DevOps and Mobile Application Engineering.
My interests lie in how cloud based infrastructures and mobile devices could revolutionise ubiquitous computing and today's tech world.
GDG Cyprus Lead and HackCyprus Organiser

Mike Yerou, Software Engineer - Director

Mike Yerou studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens and completed his master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Southern California. He interned at Amazon in San Francisco before joining Google in London as a full-time software engineer. After almost 7 years at Google, he left to co-found his own company, Pale Blue, doing tailor-made software for enterprises worldwide.

Michalis Mavris, Software Engineer

Nicolas Ioannou, Android Engineer

I am an Android Engineer with 8+ years of experience. I started my career working at HERE Technologies (former Nokia maps) working on some B2C and B2B offerings. I moved to N26 where I spent almost 4 years working on the online banking product in various posts (memberships team, growth, platform team). My last position was at Kaia Health, a digital healthcare startup which aims to democratize healthcare with clinically proven MSK and COPD solutions.

I play the guitar, write stories, and travel at every opportunity I get.

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Partners

University of Nicosia (https://www.unic.ac.cy/)

Qbeat Technologies (https://qbeat.io/)

Pale Blue (https://www.paleblueapps.com/)
We are an ambitious company that strongly believes we can make a difference in our partner's businesses. We don’t consider ourselves a traditional agency. We do not have clients; we have long-term partners and we deeply care about the software we are creating for them.

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Complete your event RSVP here: https://gdg.community.dev/events/details/google-gdg-cyprus-presents-devfest-cyprus-2024/.