DeveloperWeek 2025

Eleftherios Chrysochoidis, Chubb, Lead API Software Engineer

GitHub Actions offer robust and free CI/CD capabilities to streamline your development process. In this presentation, we'll dive into the core components of GitHub Actions and explore how they can be set to work for you by demonstrating various simple and advanced use cases!

GitHub Actions is an ideal tool for any project hosted on GitHub. It provides CI/CD features out of the box and is accessible to everyone without the need for extra infrastructure or setup. The declarative way of creating Actions makes their usage really easy, and its remarkable free layer provides sufficient limits even for big projects.

Especially for Open Source projects, where usually there is more than a single contributor, the need for CI/CD is huge. What will happen if you own an open source project and someone creates a Pull Request with really nice features but adds Security risks in the project (e.g. due to deprecated dependencies) or if they break some of the existing functionality? Would you be able to check all of them on your own? Maybe yes, but it would take much more time compared to having them all checked automatically by utilizing GitHub Actions.

Join me to explore how to make GitHub Actions run faster by utilizing caching mechanisms, build Reports for Testing, Coverage and Security issues and integrate them with any open Pull Request in the community, to have an automated evaluation of the suggested PR and get notifications for them.

Jessica Deen, GitHub, Staff Developer Advocate

Unlock the full potential of GitHub Actions in this 25-minute demo with Jessica Deen, staff developer advocate at GitHub. Jessica will guide you through advanced features, such as job summaries, matrix jobs, reusable workflows, and OpenID Connect for passwordless cloud deployments. You'll also learn more about artifact attestations and explore starter workflow templates to help streamline your CI/CD processes. You'll see how these powerful tools can enhance your development workflow, boost productivity, and ensure security. 

Ben Ryves, GetYourGuide, Staff Site Reliability Engineer
Maggie Slukova, GetYourGuide, Staff Site Reliability Engineer

How difficult is it to minimize the toil of cluster upgrades while increasing confidence in deploying the changes?

Even when managed, cluster upgrades are an unavoidable part of cluster maintenance, yet they can also be a source of toil, stress and outages; either when upgrading Kubernetes itself or additional cluster components. Manually testing changes in staging clusters, deploying with a high sense of uncertainty - these time consuming tasks can be mitigated with tests. Add nifty automation and cluster management efforts are reduced to a bare minimum.

Is investing in cluster tests and automation worth it? Yes! This talk shows how a team of three engineers keeps multiple clusters continuously up-to-date with minimal time investment, effort and disruptions. By leveraging the e2e-framework and Helm, everything from Istio to cluster autoscaler is tested and seamlessly managed.

Roy Maor, Cisco, Algorithm Team Lead

It is evident that using a graph theory-based approach to reduce cyber security risk on the cloud is a need rather than a want. Having a reliable data model and a continuous mapping of your
cloud environment to a graph database yields value in two different aspects. First, visibility – gaining a deep understanding of the environment’s cloud architecture, and second, cloud risk
management – identifying critical attack paths in the environment and mitigating the risk they present. By finding the right connections between graph algorithms to cloud security
misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, gaining brand new visibility on faulty cloud architecture and turning it into high-value context-based risk insights becomes possible.

Animesh Mishra, Diffblue, Senior Solutions Engineer

Developer toil is real — days, even weeks, are spent conducting manual, repetitive, time-gobbling tasks like unit testing. And while GenAI coding assistants can support developers, they repeatedly fall short in performing complex TestQA tasks without human oversight.

The problem is compounded by the shortage of experienced testers, leaving developers drowning in QA testing rather than writing and innovating application code. Reports show 75% of developers’ time is spent on tasks other than code generation, resulting in 57% of developers admitting to skipping unit tests entirely.

For companies to succeed, code must be fool proof. So how can developers ensure testing is comprehensive and done with due diligence — and at scale?

The answer lies in reinforcement learning-based autonomous AI, which can eliminate up to 95% of the time developers typically spend on test writing. In this session, you will learn how to eliminate developer toil by automating manual and tedious test operations at scale (both locally and in CI), how the right tools can autonomously write and maintain unit tests for entire Java code bases, and how to ensure your unit tests for complex code are comprehensive.

This talk is designed for dev leaders looking to push the boundaries of what’s possible in Test/QA with emerging AI technology.

Tony Blank, FusionAuth, Sr. Director of Developer Marketing

Join Tony Blank of FusionAuth on a captivating journey through the evolution of authentication—from ancient clay seals to modern biometrics. Blending history, tech milestones, and humor, this talk explores how humanity has secured identity and access across ages, offering insights for developers, entrepreneurs, and tech enthusiasts alike. 

Andrew Peterson, MESCIUS, Technical Engagement Engineer

This presentation focuses on UX and UI design, why they are important, and how to follow the industry's best practices. We will take a closer and more precise look at these best practices so you can create an app or website that will have an advantage over the competition. 

Neha Surendranath, LinkedIn, Sr. Technical Program Manager

In this technical session, we will explore advanced strategies to enhance the efficiency and reliability of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. We will also discover how implementing GitOps workflows with Argo CD and Flux can automate deployments and ensure consistency across environments. We'll also delve into advanced deployment techniques such as canary and blue-green releases to minimize downtime and reduce risk. 

Eleftherios Chrysochoidis, Chubb, Lead API Software Engineer

GitHub Actions offer robust and free CI/CD capabilities to streamline your development process. In this presentation, we'll dive into the core components of GitHub Actions and explore how they can be set to work for you by demonstrating various simple and advanced use cases!

GitHub Actions is an ideal tool for any project hosted on GitHub. It provides CI/CD features out of the box and is accessible to everyone without the need for extra infrastructure or setup. The declarative way of creating Actions makes their usage really easy, and its remarkable free layer provides sufficient limits even for big projects.

Especially for Open Source projects, where usually there is more than a single contributor, the need for CI/CD is huge. What will happen if you own an open source project and someone creates a Pull Request with really nice features but adds Security risks in the project (e.g. due to deprecated dependencies) or if they break some of the existing functionality? Would you be able to check all of them on your own? Maybe yes, but it would take much more time compared to having them all checked automatically by utilizing GitHub Actions.

Join me to explore how to make GitHub Actions run faster by utilizing caching mechanisms, build Reports for Testing, Coverage and Security issues and integrate them with any open Pull Request in the community, to have an automated evaluation of the suggested PR and get notifications for them.

Ben Ryves, GetYourGuide, Staff Site Reliability Engineer
Maggie Slukova, GetYourGuide, Staff Site Reliability Engineer

How difficult is it to minimize the toil of cluster upgrades while increasing confidence in deploying the changes?

Even when managed, cluster upgrades are an unavoidable part of cluster maintenance, yet they can also be a source of toil, stress and outages; either when upgrading Kubernetes itself or additional cluster components. Manually testing changes in staging clusters, deploying with a high sense of uncertainty - these time consuming tasks can be mitigated with tests. Add nifty automation and cluster management efforts are reduced to a bare minimum.

Is investing in cluster tests and automation worth it? Yes! This talk shows how a team of three engineers keeps multiple clusters continuously up-to-date with minimal time investment, effort and disruptions. By leveraging the e2e-framework and Helm, everything from Istio to cluster autoscaler is tested and seamlessly managed.

Roy Maor, Cisco, Algorithm Team Lead

It is evident that using a graph theory-based approach to reduce cyber security risk on the cloud is a need rather than a want. Having a reliable data model and a continuous mapping of your
cloud environment to a graph database yields value in two different aspects. First, visibility – gaining a deep understanding of the environment’s cloud architecture, and second, cloud risk
management – identifying critical attack paths in the environment and mitigating the risk they present. By finding the right connections between graph algorithms to cloud security
misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, gaining brand new visibility on faulty cloud architecture and turning it into high-value context-based risk insights becomes possible.

Animesh Mishra, Diffblue, Senior Solutions Engineer

Developer toil is real — days, even weeks, are spent conducting manual, repetitive, time-gobbling tasks like unit testing. And while GenAI coding assistants can support developers, they repeatedly fall short in performing complex TestQA tasks without human oversight.

The problem is compounded by the shortage of experienced testers, leaving developers drowning in QA testing rather than writing and innovating application code. Reports show 75% of developers’ time is spent on tasks other than code generation, resulting in 57% of developers admitting to skipping unit tests entirely.

For companies to succeed, code must be fool proof. So how can developers ensure testing is comprehensive and done with due diligence — and at scale?

The answer lies in reinforcement learning-based autonomous AI, which can eliminate up to 95% of the time developers typically spend on test writing. In this session, you will learn how to eliminate developer toil by automating manual and tedious test operations at scale (both locally and in CI), how the right tools can autonomously write and maintain unit tests for entire Java code bases, and how to ensure your unit tests for complex code are comprehensive.

This talk is designed for dev leaders looking to push the boundaries of what’s possible in Test/QA with emerging AI technology.

Tony Blank, FusionAuth, Sr. Director of Developer Marketing

Join Tony Blank of FusionAuth on a captivating journey through the evolution of authentication—from ancient clay seals to modern biometrics. Blending history, tech milestones, and humor, this talk explores how humanity has secured identity and access across ages, offering insights for developers, entrepreneurs, and tech enthusiasts alike. 

Andrew Peterson, MESCIUS, Technical Engagement Engineer

This presentation focuses on UX and UI design, why they are important, and how to follow the industry's best practices. We will take a closer and more precise look at these best practices so you can create an app or website that will have an advantage over the competition.