DEV: Challenge Accepted 2025 - The Elevation: Lightning Talks

This session features a series of lightning talks from various speakers highlighting their insights on software development, cybersecurity, and mentoring in the tech industry. One speaker emphasizes the importance of focusing on people development over traditional software development processes, urging listeners to care about their colleagues and seek effective processes in their work environments. Another speaker shares a concerning personal experience about a security vulnerability in a school's remote control system, drawing attention to the critical need for secure coding practices. Additionally, two developers introduce their pet care application aimed at connecting pet owners with trusted sitters, showcasing their project which won first place in a national competition. Lastly, a speaker encourages experienced professionals to mentor younger individuals in the tech field, highlighting the significance of knowledge sharing.

Challenge accepted. [music] Challenge Challenge accepted. Challenge [music] accepted. Challenge accepted. P2 is always [music] challenge accepted. Welcome to the lightning talks, the conference feature that runs faster than your CI/CD pipeline on Friday deploy. >> Here's the deal. Each Revso who stepups gets just 5 minutes to deliver their story, demo, or wild idea. >> No unit tests, no retries. When the time is up, the gong hits and

the process is killed. Buck the gong. [music] >> This is the gong. Buckle up. Lightning talk start now. >> Who is first? >> Who is first? [music] [cheering] [applause] >> Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so uh I was wondering what to tell you guys. I don't have a very good idea of uh what I'm about to talk right now. So bear with me. Usually that's

how I work. Uh first of all, what do you think about the volleyball match today? The finals. We lost to Italy. Disappointed people. >> Yes. Yeah. Do you consider this a failure by the Bulgarian team? >> Do you think that the team feels disappointed and they feel it like a failure? >> I can assure you that they do. Uh I want to start with that because I'm

pretty sure that what the team discussed today after the match is that uh they want to come back next year and actually win it and they will but yeah the moral of the story is no matter what you do at the end if you fail or you feel like you failed you just open up new opportunities. Uh in this very moment it's really important to think about

the people. So my topic there is called software like scratched development and instead of software development we want to focus on people development. We want to talk about the people because people are the single thing that actually matters in your in your environment in your culture in your relatives in pretty much everything that you do. Um so probably this is going to be a tricky qu question

for all of you but please raise your hand if you care. Uh well not if you care but if you're not scared to do it. if you feel like your work is being respected and recognized by the company you work with. Okay, that that's good. That's good. I hope that's going to be the case for all of you. I know some of you are a bit biased.

That's why you rose your hand. Uh but that's not really important. So, uh half of my time is gone, so I'm just going to stick back to my notes here because I usually talk a lot. Um, I want to tell you that I've been in all of it. I've been part of a startup scale up. I've been part of outstaffing, outsourcing, and now I am trying to

be a good manager in an enterprise company. Uh, the problem with all of that is everything is different. No matter where you are, you're always going to face different challenges. You have to accept them all. Obviously, that's why we're here. So um if you don't care about your people, if you are a manager, team lead or something of the sort, uh things are not going to work

quite well. If you are not on that position quite yet, then you need to always have that in mind. If you don't feel respected, if you don't feel that the company keeps their boundaries towards what you do, towards what you believe in, then probably that's not the place for you. Then you need to work with someone who can make uh something else happen for you. And um

what else do I have here? Ah the process. So um we as software companies as leaders as developers we need to care about the people around us. People around us should also care about something really important which is called a process. So if you end up in a place when there is no a good process established push for it. It may seem stupid at the end. You

may think that you can just sit down, code the world, forget about it in the night with a beer or whiskey or whatever you drink, probably rakia. But the important thing is tomorrow is yet another day at work. The whole week is yet another working with that and I are going to have a rough week next week even though we're here today. So push for a process.

Push for a process because no one is going to care if you don't care for it. And uh the last thing that I want to mention, I have 15 seconds, is one minute. Okay, the timer is wrong. Uh yeah, usually if you give me more time, that's a bad idea because I talk a lot. people tend Okay. Uh people tend to dream a lot, and that's fine.

We're social creatures. Uh it's fine if you have some dreams. However, actually do you believe that dreams can be achieved? I don't agree. If a dream stays as a dream, you cannot achieve it. A dream needs to become a goal. The difference between a dream and a goal is you have a dream, it sits right there. You look at it like it's the pretty nice sun and

it's going to burn your eyes. But if you don't have an accurate plan on how to get there, on how to actually see it happening and work face by face, it's not going to work. So my point is work on your dreams by converting them to goals which are meaningful and you can actually achieve them. Put some timelines and just do it. That's it. >> [applause] >>

Round of applause of Antonakov. And now the next speaker is Spimeir Pavlov. Make some noise. [applause] Thank you all. Uh so I'm actually participating in the lightning talks for a third year in a row and every single time I end up talking about cyber security. So you would imagine that I have something to do with it at least professionally or maybe a hobby. Uh but I've not

touched a cyber security course or anything in the past 5 years. So how does it always end up being the thing I talk about? Well, there's two reasons. The first one is that it always ends with the most interesting outcomes out of anything else I can tell you. And two, it turns out that whatever kind of developer you are, security is actually quite a big part of

your job, or at least it should be because even if you don't think you need to do it, uh you will end up in some situation where stuff's gotten really bad and now you have to learn it really quickly and it's already too late. So let's try to not get to that point. Uh what I want to talk about is a quick story where a very large

company which I will not name uh for reasons had a vulnerability that allowed me to control other students and teachers computers uh with a vulnerability that was uh covered in any tutorial any beginner tutorial for backend or full stack programming and that's password hashing. Uh it was a system that allowed our teachers to control our computers, walk them, see what we were looking at, control them, do

anything, literally remote code execution. So you would think that they probably had some quite beefy security and I would imagine that as well. Uh but I just started looking without any real hope of finding something. I was just interested in the system. Uh I opened it up on my school computer. I found out that it used passwords for a authentication. Uh, and so I imagined that they

would be hashed and maybe the teacher will set them to make sure that it is the teacher trying to control my computer. So I got home and I installed the application, one uh teacher instance on a virtual machine, one on my computer and I started playing with it and it's not a web app so you can just open dev tools and maybe they imagined that because you

can't open dev tools it's not really a problem. You can't inspect traffic. Uh, but wire sharkark exists. So you open up Wireshark uh and you look through the first request and you do a CtrlF for the password that you just put in uh and it's the first thing that the teacher sends to the computer. And as it turns out, the password is always the same for the

entire group of people. So I returned to school the next day with no intention, just having fun. Uh, and I opened up Wireshark and I waited for my teacher to look at my computer through their screen. They did. And so I saw the password and I downloaded a TJ instance. I put the password in expecting to be able to control all of my other classmates computers. Uh,

and to my surprise, uh, I got all of the computers in the entire school, uh, plus the teachers computers. I had some fun with that. Uh, I didn't do anything bad because why would you? You're just having fun. You don't want to cause problems for anyone else. Uh, I reported it to the teachers afterwards. They told me to just be quiet about it. So, that's nice. Uh

and it just shows that even in very security critical applications such simple stuff can be missed and such simple stuff can lead to really bad things happening because yes I just used it to play around but someone who wants to do something for themselves can very easily do so. There's a lot of sophisticated hackers out there and if you don't do a [clears throat] job to secure

your applications, they will take advantage of it and hopefully no one blames you, but you still might feel the guilt sometime. Thank you. >> Well done. Well done. Thank you very much. >> Thank you. I love you. >> And now, please make some noise for Tanya and Kristo. >> Is it a dance? >> Hello everybody. >> My name is Tanya. >> And my name is Kristo. And

>> I want to start with one quick question. How many of you have pets? >> Okay, that's great. >> Uh, and I want to ask a follow-up question. Thank you. >> Okay, I want to ask a follow-up question, which is, how many of you have been in a situation where you had to leave your pet at home alone without anyone anyone being able to look after it?

>> Okay, that's also great. >> Uh yeah, >> kind of. Okay. Well, that's great. Uh and that's something we will talk about. But before we get to that, uh we want to travel back in time to around around the same time last year when we decided that we want to create something meaningful. We are both software developers. Uh she handles the front end, I the back end,

and we wanted to create something that we love. And so we started banging our heads uh trying to find a problem that we might solve. And after a lot of hard work, we found one uh which I'm not going to reveal yet. But um after while we were at it, we decided that we would uh participate in the National Olympia of IT here in Bulgaria. Uh and

after a lot of hard work, sleepless nights, skipping school, which we enjoyed, uh we won the first place. Uh and yeah, congratulations to us. >> So what are we talking about is Wapichkl or postluse? You can find it at the link postpl.eu if you have any interest. But what is wapichkiplus? It is a web and mobile application which is dedicated to the sitters and owners of a

pet. Uh you can register in our app as a owner of a pet. Enter all the needed information about it. Uh also save all your future vaccinations and uh appointments so that you don't have to worry about them anymore and get push notifications about them. And also in our application you can find trusted and verified sitters. so that they can look after your pet when you are

not at home. But also if you want to use your free time meaningfully and if you also love pets, you can offer your services in our application as a uh sitter of a pet. Uh you can offer dog walking, boarding, uh pet sitting or even training. uh you can create flexible uh schedule, put your own prices, but before you become visible in our system, you have to

go through a process where admins verify you so that we can uh keep our system verified and trusted. >> Yeah. And as Tanya said, it is publicly available at postplus.u uh but it is not officially developed. It has some finishing touches that we want to do. Uh and it is something that really we really believe in and that we really love. We poured our souls into it.

So uh if you ever are in a situation where you need to find someone to look after your pet, we will be happy if you remembered us and uh yeah visited us. >> Thank you very much. And please beware of he is very dangerous in [laughter] And now, are there any more? No. Oh. NICOLOLA [screaming] OF N. >> YEAH, I had an introduction finally. So, I got

here on the stage just in case I'm not selected as death of the year to later. So, uh no really I wanted to talk about uh something that is uh really dear to me. Uh I see a lot of professionals here, a lot of people that know a lot of stuff and I want to just uh remind you and tell you that uh it's a great thing

to share that knowledge with people and uh today we had couple of representatives of uh good programs that uh you can participate in. We had asukis I can here and now. We had uh also mentor the young which is a great program that I'm part of also we had soft tuni budito they yeah so if you want if you can please join such program share your knowledge

there are a lot of good kids a lot of great kids that needs some push they they need some information they need someone to mentor them and to learn something new to start their careers and uh just uh to be ready to be the next best professionals that you can face in Bulgaria. Thank you. [applause] >> Thank you, Nit. [sighs] And that was all from lightning talks.