DevOpsDays Prague 2025

#eventsinyourcity #devops #security #webdev

DevOpsDays Prague 2025 is over, and I sit on my chair today to write something special about it. Not because someone asked me, but because I liked the event so much. Two years ago, I was a media partner, but this year, I visited as a freelancer, which has shaped my experience a bit.

Tomas Kubica - (No) Future of coding and scripting in the AI era

Tomas covered some exciting areas on how AI will soon shape the roles of programmers. His talk was practical, a bit scary, but full of great ideas. The first part covered how to utilize Copilot to create comprehensive documentation about your services. The leading consumer of this documentation will be an AI agent, after all. I recommend watching his recording if available.

The TL;DR was that if you are a junior developer, AI can help you learn faster, and if you are a senior developer, you have the tools to focus not on writing code itself but on realizing your vision.

Victoria Shutenko - Adventures in Cloud Security: What DevOps Can Learn from a Security Engineer

The introductory talk about secure SDLC was spot on. She covered some key steps that we can all take to produce more secure code and provided examples and tool proposals. It was for beginners, so I didn't find anything new for myself, but the audience benefited from it, given that they knew very little about security. :) Oops, I said it.

Daniel Afonso - Full Service Ownership & The Lifecycle of a Service

Daniel had a great overview talk about the service ownership model. He explained the theory and the challenges well. Sometimes, the idea of you, as a team and individual developer, being responsible for supporting what you develop might be scary, but it's the right thing to do. I know some teams that start cursing when they hear the word "PagerDuty" because that means on-call and constant stress. If you misdesign it, you can't blame the concept or the tools.

Timur Bublik - The irony of cloud cost-cutting: when saving money leads to losing money

That was the talk that was less interesting to me at first, but then Timur made me think about how we can optimize the cost of cloud services and not mess it up. The examples he gave were spot on, and I recommend that every PM or person concerned about cloud costs watch it first before making any inefficient decision.

Soham Chakraborty - Running Kubernetes on small scale - lessons learned on operating 'small scale' clusters

That was a hands-on practical talk that brought tons of knowledge based on real use cases from a team that runs k8s on a small scale. How small, you might ask - well, you will have to watch the recording to unravel the mystery. I love it when someone talks not just about theory but shares the problems they had and how they solved them.

Peter Janečko - Security Culture: Why it's important?

Getting the Security Champions program right is a very challenging mission. Peter showed their experience in doing that in a large enterprise, which adds extra complexity to the task. I found the talk and the information to be scattered, so if you're not familiar with the topic, you might get confused at first. Read between the lines. The one thing I learned from this is that it can take a lot of time and resources to start an initiative like this, and you need to explain it well to the business in terms they will understand.

Is there more?

Some other important points that might be helpful for you if you want to visit the next time:

I've met many people I knew and formed some new connections.
My yaml-shaped "hire me" poster on the job board was the only one in the "looking for a job" section.
The food was terrific. I suspect that some people came just for it.
Sometimes, when you're thirsty, Budvar is a good beer.
It's not a for-profit event, so the value for money was extraordinary.
The open spaces were better than in 2023, but there is still work to be done on them. There was a slot when even the person who suggested the topic didn't show up. An initial vote on the issues would be beneficial and then focus on the topics with the most votes rather than every single one.
The organizing team was terrific. I've attended many events, so that I can tell :)
The audience was not engaged, and they didn't have many questions. That could be a good area to explore for the next event.

Thanks for reading this. Visit the event next year to learn more, meet friendly people, and enjoy the pancakes...

What about...

If you're interested in hiring me, you can visit my website here. In the modern VUCA world, I save you ⌛ time, 😤 frustration, and 🤑 money! I make your teams 💯 better and more secure.

Have a great day,
Bogo