DevFest Milano 2024

Last week, 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 perks—better quality of life, stunning views, and a slower pace—but networking opportunities for developers are rare. Most of the time, I rely on online communities to stay connected. That’s why, when I stumbled across this conference on Eventbrite, I didn’t 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 differently—some 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 user’s 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 Danilo’s 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 topic—building a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system for internal documentation—might 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 company’s efficiency, and the way they tackled these challenges was nothing short of impressive.

Gemini Functions Calls in Flutter

Though I’ve 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 Carlo’s 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. I’d love to see a sequel to this talk in a future conference—it definitely left me wanting more!

Conclusion

Attending DevFest Milan 2024 was a refreshing experience. While the topics weren’t overly advanced, they struck the right balance for a community-driven event that aims to engage developers of all levels.

If you’re a developer looking for inspiration, networking, or just a reason to step away from your screen, I’d highly recommend keeping an eye out for the next DevFest near you. And if you’re lucky enough to live close to Milan, don’t miss it!