DevFest St. John's 2025

Join us for the annual developer conference, featuring sessions, workshops, training, code labs, and much more by awesome speakers. 

With an amazing keynote, workshop, and demo, DevFest St. John's will advance your expertise in cloud and web. Master the tools and techniques required to design, architect, develop, scale, launch, integrate, and maintain today’s advanced technology solutions. 

This year's DevFest explores how we can build safe, secure, and scalable solutions with AI and Cloud.

Agenda

9:00 AM: Registration and Welcome

9:30 AM: Welcome Address - GDG Lead

9:45 AM: IAC & Cloud Native with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) - Faiaz Halim

This workshop is designed for developers, DevOps engineers, and cloud enthusiasts who want to gain practical experience in automating infrastructure provisioning and deploying modern applications. Participants will write and apply Terraform configurations to provision a containerized application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), leveraging other cloud-native services like Cloud Storage and Cloud Build. By the end of this session, you will have a foundational understanding of how to harness the power of Terraform and GCP to build and manage robust cloud-native systems.

10:30 AM: Accelerating MADLC: A Developer's Guide to Development with Flutter - Karimul Hasan

Learn how to build beautiful, natively compiled mobile applications for both iOS and Android from a single codebase using Google's Flutter framework. This session will cover the key concepts of Flutter and include a fast-paced live demo showing you how Flutter accelerates the entire development lifecycle.

11:15 AM: techNL Networking Bingo

Bingo, but make it tech.

11:30 AM: Scalable Tech, Real Adoption: Strategies for Modern Developers - Michael Babalola

Scalable Tech, Real Adoption: Strategies for Modern Developers
-Learn practical strategies for designing and building scalable systems that users actually adopt, from architecture choices to real-world dev workflows.
-Discover how developer decisions on performance, UX, and technical design directly influence adoption and long-term product success.
-Take away actionable techniques you can apply immediately to scale your solutions with clarity, efficiency, and real-world impact.

12:00 PM: Socials, Networking, Lunch

12:30 PM: Build Your First AI Agent Team with Google's ADK - Charmi Chokshi

The next wave of AI isn't just about single, powerful models; it's about collaboration. Imagine teams of specialized AI agents working together to solve complex problems, from automating financial analysis to streamlining creative workflows. This is the power of multi-agent systems, and it's more accessible than you think.

In this hands-on workshop, we will dive into the exciting world of multi-agent development using Google's new Agent Development Kit (ADK). You'll go from understanding the core concepts to building, running, and orchestrating your very own team of AI agents.

Participants will leave not only with a working multi-agent application but also with a fundamental understanding of how to design and build collaborative AI systems for any task. No deep ML experience is required—just your laptop, some Python basics, and a desire to build the future of AI.

2:00 PM: Building Reliable Agents with Elixir & OTP (Open Telecom Platform) - Jack Harrhy

Python and TypeScript are the obvious tools of the trade of all of the ChatGPT wrappers and AI tooling out there, but long lived tasks are always a bit of a pain point, how do you deal with persistent state? Sticky sessions? Redis? Serialize to a relational database? "use workflow";?

Learn how tools like Elixir, and its OTP (Open Telecom Platform) work, their existing usage in platforms like Discord and Whatapps, and how they to can be leveraged for AI tasks.

2:45 PM: Closing

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Speakers

Jack Harrhy - Spellbook (Software Developer)

Jack is an experienced software developer with a demonstrated history of working on all aspects of web applications, command line tools, and miscellaneous projects. When Jack is not working, he mentors budding software engineers and volunteers with a lot of tech communities.

Charmi Chokshi - Mila and UdeM (Machine Learning Engineer)

I am a Master's student in Machine Learning at MILA and the University of Montréal, Canada. In Nov 2022 I became one of the WeaveSphere Developer 30 Under 30 of Canada Awardees and in May 2022, I became a runner-up in the ‘Outstanding in AI - Young AI Role Model of the Year' - North America Award by Women in AI.
Recently, I worked at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Textract team as a Research …

Faiaz Halim - Nasdaq Verafin (Senior Analyst - Software Engineering)

Senior Analyst - Software Engineering at Nasdaq Verafin. I bring development, operations and security under one roof to create stable foundations for our AI-powered anti-financial crime systems. I build infrastructure that supports high-precision decision-making tools for complex environments. Love communication but hate being stuck in mail gridlock. Logic over emotion.

Karimul Hasan - Nasdaq Verafin (Senior Analyst - Software Engineering)

🚀 Transforming ideas into impactful digital experiences! As a dedicated Full Stack Developer with nearly half a decade of industry experience, I specialize in crafting high-performance software solutions that drive business success across multiple industries. Let's connect to explore how we can turn your next project into a success story!

Michael Babalola - Government of Newfoundland and Labrador (Digital Transformation Specialist - AI Adoption)

Hosted By

AbdulKabir Sulaiman, GDG Lead

AbdulKabir is an Innovative and award-winning Community Management Professional with multiple skills and experience across program management, communications (writing, speaking, presentation), product and relationship management.

He's also an experienced Software Engineering professional with over 4 years of experience delivering effective backend web applications that are fast, data-driven, and scalable, restful APIs, database integrations, deployments, and DevOps practices.

Afia Tiwaa Obeng, Marketing

frances utomi, Marketing

Frances Utomi is a creative marketing and events specialist with experience developing campaigns, managing social media content, and executing community-focused events. She has worked with companies like RPM Aerial Services and founded The Vibe Lab, a platform that connects people through innovative pop-up workshops and mixers. With a strong background in branding, partnerships, and event strategy, Frances is passionate about creating meaningful experiences that drive engagement and build community.

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Partners

Google (https://developers.google.com/)

Spellbook (https://www.spellbook.legal/)

CTS-NL (https://ctsnl.ca/)
The Computer Technology Society Newfoundland Labrador, generally known as CTS-NL, is a community group for people who work in or have an interest in software development, technology, and computing in Newfoundland and Labrador.

JetBrains (https://www.jetbrains.com/)
JetBrains is a cutting-edge software vendor specializing in the creation of intelligent development tools, including IntelliJ IDEA – the leading Java IDE PhpStorm, PyCharm, WebStorm, RustRover amongst other tools and plugins..

Kodeco (https://www.kodeco.com/)
The best investment for your mobile development career. Kodeco is a publisher of high-quality mobile development tutorials for iOS, Android, Flutter and other platforms.

techNL (https://technl.ca/)
techNL provides visibility, business growth services and a collective influential voice to the tech sector in Newfoundland and Labrador with a vision to make Newfoundland and Labrador the most sought-after Canadian tech ecosystem, globally recognized for its collaborative community, diversity and quality of life.

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Complete your event RSVP here: https://gdg.community.dev/events/details/google-gdg-st-johns-presents-devfest-st-johns-2025/.