CyberwiseCon / DevDays Europe, Vilnius, May 2025

In May this year I had the pleasure of speaking at the CyberWiseCon / DevDays Europe event in Vilnius, where I delivered a new talk for the first time, Digital Cat & Mouse: Strategies to Outsmart Scrapers, Phishers & Thieves.

The Talk

This talk was a collection of real-world stories from the digital trenches, going from the fictitious Shamrock island in Dublin Bay, to using 10 Downing Street, the White House, and the Eiffel Tower in unexpected ways to frustrate digital pirates. Basically a thinly-veiled excuse for me to stand on stage and tell a bunch of my favourite anecdotes!

Ready to go

It was my first time presenting this particular talk, and my prep didn't go as well as I'd hoped - a bad cold meant I hadn't been sleeping, and had about 30 minutes of speech before my voice started to go - but thankfully it went very well in the room. It's always nerve-wracking when giving a new talk - will the flow make sense in the room? Are people laughing where you expect? Are they laughing where you don't think they should be?!? Is there any engagement afterwards? In this case, I was delighted by the energy in the room, and the great questions that followed up. It's very validating as a speaker to get a series of really specific and relevant questions after a talk, as it's a good sign that the audience are engaged by the topic, the delivery, and are keen to learn more. So a success overall! The organisers also had a nice speaker's gift package afterwards - a cool thermos, and local Lithuanian chocolate, which was a nice touch.

The Conference

The conference itself was excellent! There was a packed multi-track agenda, which meant constant trade-offs between compelling sessions (always a good sign!). The conversations around the conference were excellent also. It was a hugely diverse group, which meant a really interesting mix of perspectives on everything from AI, software dev best practices, cultural differences between continents - a very wide range of topics!

Bonus points to the organisers for hosting it in a cinema. It's an unusually relaxed setting for a tech conference, with some cool conference "movie poster" art. It was all capped off with an early screening of the new Mission: Impossible film, which was a great way to finish the day.

Poster Art

The organising team did a super job. From a speaker's perspective, everything was very clear up front. There were whatsapp groups set up with speakers, messages pinging as people arrived from around the globe, and conference veterans sharing tips on where to eat, sights to see, and arranging meet-ups. It was a very effective way of creating a mini community very quickly. This was compounded at the speaker's dinner, which had a great and open atmosphere despite being a large group (50+). I particularly enjoyed meeting up with Victor Lyuboslavsky, and picking his brains on his day job at Fleet, the pros and cons of AI assistants for software and blogging, and swapping dev war stories. Victor had travelled all the way from Austin and was speaking at his first conference. It's not been long since I was in a similar position, so it was great to hear how Victor's path had brought him here. He has written up a much more comprehensive review of the conference, which I'd recommend checking out here.

After a lovely meal, a walking tour of the city was arranged. Probably not something I'd have made time for otherwise, but a really nice way to see the key points of the city through the eyes of a local.

At the event itself, there was a separate speaker's area - a quiet zone with comfortable chairs where we could catch our breath before going out on stage, or do panel dry-runs. This was a great resource to have.

Speakers this way please

Vilnius

It was also my first time in Vilnius. It's a beautiful city, with a lot to see (and a lot of towers to climb!) From the medieval palace, to the tower where the 1989 human chain against Soviet rule began, to a ceremony marking the arrival of a new permanent German military base, Vilnius has a lot of stories to tell. A bonus was getting to see Dublin from the Vilnius side of the portal.