As I sit at Athens International Airport, waiting for my flight back to Milano after an enriching experience at Devoxx Greece 2024, I can’t help but reflecting on valuable insights shared at the conference.

Devoxx Greece, part of a network of community conferences, attracts developers with its rich content featuring both local and international speakers and a pleasant, relaxed atmosphere. With approximately 1400 attendees hailing from 25 countries, primarily across southern and eastern Europe, the conference pulsates with a dynamic mix of perspectives. The diversity both in the audience and speakers’ lineup was quite visible and signals a positive shift towards greater representation in the tech industry. I am happy to see this change happening and I am hopeful for a future marked by even stronger strides in representation and bridging the gender gap.

Throughout the conference, discussions revolved around software engineering, which is still considered an emerging practice: indeed, the technological landscape is constantly evolving, with shortening hype cycles, but we have seen frequent peaks and setbacks, and the value of collectively reflecting on the emergence of best practices with a critical, non-commercial view, is crucial. This is why independent conferences like Devoxx and more strategy-focused events are valuable food for thought.

Now, while I could never capture the full richness of the conference in this brief recap, I would like to share a glimpse of the talks I attended. My experience at Devoxx started with an insightful talk on the basics of building a Virtual Machine – truth be told, this is something most developers, including myself, will never need to do but it’s indeed always a good habit to look at what runs under the hood of the car you drive. It was a jump into notions acquired in the past, but with an engaging and entertaining presentation making the ramp accessible to the listener. I think I’ll check out the code repository and play with it as soon as possible!

Next up was a captivating talk on analysis techniques aimed at uncovering code smells evidencing poor practices around code maintenance, and some tips to fix them. It’s not a coincidence that a copy of the speaker’s book is on my desk at work. The speaker kicked off the discussion with a reference to the classic book The Mythical Man Month and a reminder that adding people late to a project behind schedule will delay it even more. As a delivery leader, it is a reminder of the importance of empowering small software teams and creating the right conditions around them. Interestingly, this was also the center of a conversation I had the evening before with a local friend who also manages software teams; no coincidence given the relevance of the topic for most of us.

Another keynote on Friday was about what makes a good architect, delivered by a friend and former manager of mine, Gregor. Some recommendations concerning peculiar aspects of the profession were shared, such as avoiding isolation between strategy and technology, looking at problems in 3D to highlight non-self-evident aspects, and bringing value in times of uncertainty with viable options. I place these same principles at the core of the architecture practice for my Team.

Other sessions I have attended covered a range of topics including the enablement of DevOps practices, choosing the right observability stack, sustainable IT operations – a subject I delved into last year at a conference in Pisa alongside a Computer Science PhD student with whom I share a mutual interest in the topic – and a discussion on ways to improve incident management practices. I look forward to listening to the other talks once the recordings will be available online.

But perhaps the highlight of the conference – and one of the reasons for me being in Athens – was the opportunity to share my own experiences alongside a trusted colleague and friend Jean Francois. Our talk “Plenty of Platforms – Lessons Learned” delved into a decade-long journey of building platforms together and in different organizations, ranging from internal developer platforms to cloud and data platforms. For each story we presented, we put emphasis on a specific aspect to share practical insights and the lessons we have learned along the way. The content links to our book Platform Strategy – Innovation through Harmonization authored with another friend Gregor. It was fun to distribute the first ever printed early edition copies to some randomly picked participants and sign them at the end of the day. Of course, building IT platforms has a lot to do with what I do at Objectway, and it is interesting for me to have had the opportunity to spend some time in the last year and half on this endeavor because it gave me the opportunity to reflect on platform from different viewpoints: strategically, technically and organizationally. Writing is indeed a powerful tool to cement ideas and try to remove ambiguity in our reasonings.

It is now time to head to the gate, the conference is behind, but my learning journey continues with my team at Objectway.

I am currently looking for mid-senior developers to grow our team in Milano, Bari and Rome. Technical excellence, team contribution, and customer centricity are the key pillars for our delivery organization journey. I look for candidates that can work in small self-organizing teams with a fast-paced delivery, use technology responsibly, have experience in refactoring and modernization, care about software quality, and explore solutions and technologies with a good degree of autonomy. If you are involved in software development, you are polyglot and fluently speak Java and Python, know SQL and non-SQL DBMS, have experience with Spring Framework and Apache Spark, normally run your workload in containers but know a JEE server if you see one, and you are curious about finance, you may like to reach out through our recruiting channels!

Meanwhile, discover job positions here: https://www.objectway.com/careers-open-job-positions/