The 4th of June Dev@CGI is organizing our annual Dev@CGI congress! An evening with interesting talks, by both external and internal speakers, a moment to share knowledge and meet your peers. The last event was a big success with over 200 people; we hope to see you all again! This time our main topic is ‘Serious tech, serious impact, serious fun’ – we hope that is something which will inspire you.
Keynotes
Context Engineering: From Vibe Coding to Production-Grade
AI Systems
- Leon Meijer
AI tools can make developers 10x faster, or... completely ineffective.
In this session we explore why the difference lies in context and harness engineering: the discipline of structuring and controlling how AI systems operate. Through real-world examples, we dive into how coding agents actually work, why they fail in practice, and how to design workflows that scale from prototype to production.
A combination of both high level and deep technical session on the future of software development — where building systems becomes orchestrating them.
Leon Meijer is a Solution Architect specializing in enterprise search, AI, and large-scale knowledge systems. He designs and builds production-grade AI platforms in highly regulated and on-premise environments, focusing on hybrid search, knowledge graphs, and agentic RAG architectures. Leon is also the CEO and Founder of Indentia.ai, a European-sovereign AI knowledge platform that fundamentally transforms how knowledge-intensive organizations make decisions and perform work.
Let’s use IntelliJ as a game engine, just because we can
- Alexander Chatzizacharias
Ever wondered what would happen if you used IntelliJ IDEA as a game engine? Probably not, but Alexander did, and it turns out, it’s absurd and a lot of fun! Join Alexander for a lighthearted yet insightful dive into the absurdness of using one of the most sophisticated IDEs to create games within your codebase because... well, why not?
In this talk, Alexander will walk you through his adventure of using the IntelliJ plugin platform to implement game logic, render graphics, and more. He’ll share the head-scratching moments, the "aha!" breakthroughs, and the plain stupidity of making this idea work. You'll see IntelliJ handling sprites, game physics, and maybe even a rogue mutable variable trying to destroy your cursor!
This session is for anyone who believes that the best projects are born from a spark of curiosity and a sense of fun. Discover how pushing the boundaries of your tools can lead to unexpected innovations and a lot of laughs along the way. After all, the most important work we do is often the work we find the most fun. Come ready to chuckle, learn, and maybe even be inspired to try your own offbeat experiments!
Alexander, a 35-year-old Software Engineer, holds dual Dutch and Greek nationality. He earned his master’s degree in Game Studies from the University of Amsterdam, where he discovered his passion for gamification and software engineering. Alexander aims to bridge the gap between game development and software engineering, believing that both industries have much to learn from each other. He is dedicated to integrating technologies and methodologies from both fields. Additionally, he enjoys experimenting with new technologies and cutting-edge sdk’s.
Bas Varkevisser Award Ceremony - Eltjo Poort & Bharath Tekumar
The annual Bas Varkevisser Award recognizes a CGI member who has fulfilled an architect, designer or other technical leadership role in the past period, exemplifying good architecting and adding value for CGI and its clients. The winner of this year’s Award, Bharath Tekumar, will receive a plaque and will give a short presentation of his achievements which resulted in winning of this reward.
Breakout sessions
- Wesley van Schaijk - Serious impact, intentional fun, accidental wisdom; lessons from a decade of “helping out” in higher education
- I never planned to spend a decade in higher education, yet one “sure, I can help” turned into another, and another, and suddenly I was everywhere: advisory boards, running labs, coaching peers, and occasionally battling the same apps that were supposed to examinate programming skills that have emotionally defeated years of students.
This talk is a humorous journey through the lessons I didn’t expect to learn: the moments when everything clicked, the ones that crashed spectacularly, and the small wins that somehow created a big impact on me as a person and professional. I’ll share how my perspective shifted as I moved between roles, why some of the hardest challenges became the most meaningful experiences, and how fun became the glue that kept it all worth doing.
- Rens van der Meijs - Building worlds to better ours: The skill of Game Development
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Are games a waste of time? Game development is often seen through the narrow lens of entertainment, but it is actually one of the most multidisciplinary challenges a human can undertake. What if the skills required to build a game were the same ones needed to better our world? In this session, we explore how game development requires us to be engineers, artists, psychologists, and storytellers. Learn how developing a game doesn't just make you a better developer, but a more empathic, capable, and informed human being.
- Eric-Wubbo Lameijer - From Big Ball of Mud to Workable Code: a data-driven approach to focus refactoring and re-architecting
- The Problem: You are working on a mission-critical system that has many more 1,000-line methods than you prefer, as well as files named ‘morefunctions.c’. The team knows the code is a "tar pit." Unfortunately, management is impervious to "feelings" about code quality. Then you cause a bug in production because you only found 12 copy-pasted blocks of code – and there turn out to have been 14…
The Solution: In this talk, I’ll show you how to move beyond linters, ‘clean code’ theory, and opinions. We will explore how to use behavioral code analysis—harvesting metrics from your Git history—to identify the "hotspots" where technical debt matters most from a money, bugs and stress perspective, and find the clues on where to focus refactoring efforts and even on what a better architecture for vulnerable parts of the code would look like!
What you’ll learn:
• How to identify and prioritize code that isn't just "ugly," but high-risk.
• How to use change coupling to find those hidden dependencies lying in ambush to ‘enhance’ your shiny new pull request with devious bugs.
How to provide quantitative/ROI arguments and visible progress to get management aligned and your team motivated to get out of the mud and into code that not only is nice and efficient to work in, but also produces a newfound product quality and work tempo that pleases the customer beyond expectations.
- Wouter van der Harg - Speed-up your (AI-)team by shifting left
- Wouter will show interactively the impact of using coding, security and architecture best practices and not using best practices in the same design. By surprise you might notice that definition first design and using best practices is not slowing you down but speeds up the process, and even giving better results at the same time; win-win.
- Mats Donselaar - Laika: How making a simple conversion tool got successfully out of hand
- You join a project with people you’ve never worked with before. There is no scope defined other than a single powerpoint slide, the product owner does not like writing stories, people started building a frontend without a backend, and there is no plan on how to make the MVP a reality. Sounds like a project doomed to fail, right?
The reasonably simple conversion tool called Laika made me reevaluate what is truly necessary to make a project successful. In a series of both technical and non-technical puzzles, this small project got out of hand to deliver technically complex innovations that made the client reconsider some of their core principles.
This presentation is a somewhat dramatic retelling of the ups and downs of developing an application in the most agile way I’ve done to date. I will share my experiences with a UX-first approach, vertical development, tactical scope creep, and just-in-time design to deliver an application that clients love working in, and developers love working on.
- Janco van der Molen – Bring IT and OT Together: Manufacturing on Steroids
- Ever tried upgrading a manufacturing system while half your machines were built before APIs even existed? That was the challenge Janco faced. A client set out to modernize their MES—the system responsible for collecting and managing data from the shop floor. The goal sounded simple: collect data from all machinery in one standardized way.
In reality, data is fragmented across multiple formats and protocols, originating from diverse sources such as PLCs, test equipment, and other IT systems. This creates a complex landscape where no single solution fits—and replacing everything simply isn’t an option.
Janco will guide you on a journey into the world of manufacturing, explaining how a modern, flexible toolset was built. Not only were the client’s goals achieved, but a foundation was created for a reusable, ready-to-deploy IIoT stack. By combining modern technologies like Docker, C#, and Linux with proven open-source solutions, the team created a scalable and future-proof approach.The result is an IIoT gateway that bridges the gap between the traditional world of industrial OT and the fast-paced world of IT. Working closely with OT security specialists, the team delivered a working proof of concept aligned with OT practices, while benefiting from the flexibility and deployability of modern IT. You’ll walk away with concrete insights into integrating IT with real-world manufacturing operations.
Registration form
