At the end of last year I had the pleasure of attending DevFest Milan 2024 , an event organized by GDG (Google Developer Groups) communities worldwide.
Living in a small town on the Ligurian west coast has its perksbetter quality of life, stunning views, and a slower pacebut networking opportunities for developers are rare. Most of the time, I rely on online communities to stay connected. Thats why, when I stumbled across this conference on Eventbrite, I didnt think twice before grabbing a ticket (which, by the way, was free!).
The event was held in Milan, attracting a mix of local developers, students, and even attendees from abroad. It was wonderful to experience such an inclusive and welcoming atmosphere.
A Spotlight on AI
The conference heavily focused on artificial intelligence , which makes perfect sense given its prominence in tech over the past few years. Here are the talks I attended:
Dealing with GenAI agents and rapid-fire messaging
Da Documenti Statici a Risposte Immediate: La Rivoluzione AI nel Settore Industriale
Dagli atomi ai template: Come sviluppare un design system senza perderci la testa!
Gemini Functions Calls in Flutter
SLSA on GCP: Let's Mitigate Supply Chain Threats
Pretotyping in the Real World - Quickly Iterating Between Good and Bad Startup Ideas
Generative AI Unveiled: From Fundamentals to Real-World Applications
Bringing Fictional Characters to Life with Open Source LLMs
The conference was well-organized, and every talk I attended was engaging and informative. Let me share some highlights from my favorite sessions.
Highlights from the Talks
Dealing with GenAI Agents and Rapid-Fire Messaging
This talk by Danilo Trombino explored a fascinating aspect of AI chatbots that I hadn't considered before: managing user interactions in real-time.
Different users communicate differentlysome send fully detailed messages in one go, while others prefer a chatty style, breaking their thoughts into multiple short messages. Adding to the complexity, the time users take to type their messages can also vary significantly.
Danilo introduced a clever solution to handle these challenges using Redis. By assigning an expiring key to each users message, Redis tracks activity in real-time. If no new messages are sent within a specific time frame, the expiration triggers a request to the AI. This approach not only minimizes unnecessary calls to the AI service but also supports scalability by using Redis as a centralized system across multiple application instances.
The insights were practical, and Danilos clear explanations made it one of the standout talks for me.
Da Documenti Statici a Risposte Immediate: La Rivoluzione AI nel Settore Industriale
This was easily my favorite talk of the conference. While the topicbuilding a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system for internal documentationmight not sound glamorous, Christian and Andrea brought it to life by sharing real-world challenges they faced while implementing the system for a large client.
Their use of Haystack pipelines to process and integrate data with ChatGPT-based assistants was inspiring. It was a reminder of what I love most about my work: solving real problems. A system like this can genuinely improve a companys efficiency, and the way they tackled these challenges was nothing short of impressive.
Gemini Functions Calls in Flutter
Though Ive never worked with Flutter, Carlo Lucera made this talk highly accessible. He walked us through a practical example of using Gemini function calls in a Flutter app to retrieve real-time information about DevFests worldwide.
It was a well-structured session, and Carlos clarity in explaining the integration made me curious to try Flutter in the future.
Generative AI Unveiled: From Fundamentals to Real-World Applications
Yonatan Levin delivered a thought-provoking talk on optimizing search results in RAG systems using graph databases for embeddings. The ideas were advanced yet presented in a way that was easy to follow.
Unfortunately, the session ended before there was time for Q&A. Id love to see a sequel to this talk in a future conferenceit definitely left me wanting more!
Conclusion
Attending DevFest Milan 2024 was a refreshing experience. While the topics werent overly advanced, they struck the right balance for a community-driven event that aims to engage developers of all levels.
If youre a developer looking for inspiration, networking, or just a reason to step away from your screen, Id highly recommend keeping an eye out for the next DevFest near you. And if youre lucky enough to live close to Milan, dont miss it!
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