Recently, our team had the pleasure of attending DevCon 2025 on May 10th, and for me, it was my first experience at such a conference – and what a great introduction it was! It was fascinating to step into the dynamic world of software engineering on such a scale.
What is DevCon?
DevCon is a software development conference built by and for the community. This year’s event, held right here in Skopje at the Youth Cultural Center (YCC/МКЦ), brought together over 1200 attendees from across Europe. We had the opportunity to attend 7 insightful presentations delivered by experienced professionals from both local and international IT circles. Beyond the valuable content and networking opportunities, it was also a really enjoyable occasion to spend time with my company colleagues. It’s always nice to connect outside of our usual work environment.
Talks
The conference featured a diverse range of sessions, each diving into practical, real-world challenges faced by modern developers and engineers. Here are some of the highlights:
- One session offered a hands-on walkthrough of migrating an Android app from the legacy View system to Jetpack Compose, highlighting performance boosts, cleaner codebases, and improved maintainability.
- Another explored the integration of Nx to create a unified development workspace where backend and frontend seamlessly collaborate through shared types, reducing time spent on fixing breaking changes.
- The topic of cloud migration was tackled with a focus on moving from on-premises databases to AWS Aurora, shedding light on common obstacles and how to overcome them.
- A deep dive into Flutter demonstrated how it fits within a scalable software ecosystem, emphasizing best practices in architecture, CI/CD, and testing.
- One presentation challenged the reliability of traditional unit testing with Mutation Testing—an approach that introduces controlled bugs to assess test quality and robustness.
- The power of C++ in enhancing React Native performance was also showcased, especially for compute-heavy tasks like cryptography and real-time processing via native modules and the JavaScript Interface (JSI).
- Finally, a session on AI-assisted load testing demonstrated how tools like Ollama can generate and optimize Locust test cases using simple prompts, streamlining the testing process for both newcomers and experienced QA engineers.
Key Learnings and Takeaways
One of the key takeaways for our team was the sheer amount of knowledge and best practices shared. It’s clear that in software engineering, continuous learning is essential. The conference highlighted the importance of staying up-to-date with new web and mobile technologies, languages, patterns, and libraries. Personally, it reinforced for me just how much there is to learn and improve upon in our field – you can never really stop learning! We’re all excited to apply what we learned to our projects and continue to grow our expertise as a team.
Looking Ahead
In conclusion, DevCon 2025 was a valuable and inspiring experience for our company. We gained fresh insights, made meaningful connections, and reaffirmed our dedication to staying at the forefront of software engineering. We’re eager to leverage what we learned to further enhance our capabilities and deliver even better solutions.