I was at CyberWiseCon in Vilnius

In May, I had the pleasure of visiting Lithuania for the first time ever. All of this was because I was speaking at CyberWiseCon.

3 Conferences in 1

I mentioned that I was there for CyberWiseCon, but that's not entirely true. There were 3 conferences happening at once:

• CyberWiseCon - focused on security

• DevDays Europe - focused on development

• DevOps Pro - focused on DevOps

It meant that if I was bored with security, I could go and listen to a talk about Docker, for example.

But we know, it's not about quantity, but about quality. And the truth is that the organizers did an amazing job in both spaces. There were so many amazing talks.

Also, there were a lot of networking opportunities. I met so many new people.

I learned a lot

I won't lie, I still haven't watched all the recordings. I'm planning to watch most of them, which is proof of how high level of talks I experienced there. The cool part of having 3 conferences in 1 is that if you felt a bit tired of listening about security, you could switch to development or DevOps.

Here are my favorite talks:

• Romano Roth, speaking about AI-Augmented DevOps, was a great start to the conference. He pointed out how important it is to use AI to help you do your things, instead of replacing humans.

• Discussion Panel about GenAI and Cybersecurity. Together with Iva Tasheva, Marvin Ngoma, Elisa Chiapponi, and Martin Fortsch, we chatted about different perspectives of cybersecurity in those new times. While AI can enable us to do amazing things, there are also a lot of dangers it introduces.

• Radoslav Stankov delivered a great talk about RoR. Positioning it as a Single Engineer Framework is a really interesting take, but I agree it makes a lot of sense.

• Harry Kimpel's talk about monitoring AI surprised me in a very positive way. I especially like that he showed the toxicity filter.

• My favorite - Obirdability: building an observability system for bird songs by Ivana Huckova and Sven Grossmann. They showed how, using BirdNet, Prometheus, and Grafana, you can observe the birds in your garden, but also how other aspects affect them.

I was speaking there too

I had the pleasure of being a speaker and a panelist at this amazing event.

I already mentioned a bit about the discussion panel. In my opinion, it was really interesting, and it shows how many things will change because of AI. On one hand, AI helps to analyze a lot of data faster, but on the other, it's also great at creating new dangers. In the upcoming years, we will definitely see a lot of new dangers showing up, but also a huge amount of tools that will help us fight those. Patchstack's AI Code Review is a great example of such a solution.

Apart from the panel, I gave a talk about how WordPress's ecosystem handles security. In my opinion, this is a very interesting case - we're talking about the biggest CMS in the world, which really did some things very well (for example, the updates and Bug Bounties) but also failed here and there.

Also, Vilnius is amazing

A conference is one thing, but thanks to my dear friend Darius, I had the chance to learn a great deal about Vilnius. It's my first time there, but definitely not the last. The city is beautiful and full of surprises (there is even a city inside of a city, for example).

Also, I was amazed learning a lot about how amazing the Vilnius startup scene is.

In short, I do hope to return there next year to continue the sightseeing.

Time to sum up

It was AMAZING. The conference was organized perfectly, the talks were great, and the city in which it happened was lovely. You can't ask for anything more.

I'm already thinking about topics for the next year's edition.