My First #DevFest at GDG Abuja: Chaos, Clusters, AI Debt, and Community

I recently attended my first-ever #DevFest with GDG Abuja this year, and overall, it was quite an experience. I’ll admit, walking into it, I had my doubts: Would I be bored going alone? Will it just be another endless stream of AI talks? Turns out, I worried for nothing. It went quite well.

Here are my raw POVs from the day.

1. The Arrival & The “African Time” Reality: I arrived early with a few others — well before 9:00 AM. Since the event technically kicked off around 10:00 AM (true to African time fashion), we had some time to settle in. I signed in, got a seat, and quickly realized a rookie mistake: I hadn’t looked up the agenda beforehand. Finding out there were 3 different halls running sessions concurrently was a plot twist. Trying to pick between two fascinating topics happening at the exact same time was torture.

2. Hall A vs. The FOMO Struggle: My day started in Hall A with Sodiq Akinjobi for the Builder Workshop. I’m close with a founder who always boasts about his friend Sodiq, so I was pleasantly surprised to see him in Abuja and really wanted to hear him speak. It totally paid off! We all played a game he had “vibecoded” and even got a chance to build our own. Sadly, time was not our friend — we ran out of time before we could see what everyone built. The worst part? In another hall at the exact same time, Jesutoni Aderibigbe was presenting No Hide Your Update, a topic I was really looking forward to. Turns out science still hasn’t invented a way to be in two places at once yet 🥲.

3. Saving Millions with Kubernetes: The second session was by Divinewill O. (ZERO) on Cut Your Cluster in Half: Kubernetes Right-Sizing Clinic. I thoroughly enjoyed this one because Zero practically showed us how he was saving his company millions by optimizing Kubernetes clusters. It hit right at home for me — building reliable, scalable systems while optimizing core resources is exactly the kind of work I love. Bonus point: I managed to grab a selfie with Zero afterward. Great guy!

4. Networking, Exhaustion, and AI Tech Debt: After a much-needed break and networking session — where I met fellow attendees like Gambo Nasiru and Temiloluwa Omole, a Wisdom that asked some really interested questions, squeezed in a work meeting, and refocused — I dived back in. By this point, my feet were feeling the switch-hall exhaustion, but Chisom Chima’s session on AI and Technical Debt completely woke my brain back up. It gave me a lot to ponder regarding my daily workflow: She noted that while “vibe coding” is all the hype, we might be building enormous technical debt by coding faster than we can review or understand.

Research shows current AI models create verbose code that people struggle to defend or explain long-term.

Her proposed solutions? Own our system designs, instruct agents to write simpler code, set strict guards on maximum lines of code (LOC) per PR, and have teammates explicitly state where AI was used for implementations. I totally loved this grounded, realistic take on AI.

5. Wrapping Up & Looking Ahead: There were plenty of other great sessions, like Francis Igbiriki’s Your AI App Is Leaking (which led to a fantastic post-chat networking session with Ransom Philemon, and John and some others guys I failed to catch their names — I’m sorry, I was really tired by now).

By the end of the day, as an attendee who was completely spent, I could only wonder how the organizers and volunteers managed to coordinate the whole thing — especially knowing they had to scale it all over again for the final day’s event. Big kudos to the organizing team and volunteers.

Sadly, I couldn’t attend the final event, but it was worth it after all. I’m definitely looking forward to attending more of these, and who knows — maybe even speaking at one someday.

Cheers to the Google Developer Community Abuja! 🥂