Saturday 11 October 2025, Randstad Box, Via San Vigilio. A whole Saturday at DevFest Milano, the Milanese stop of the DevFest circuit that Google Developer Groups run all over the world — put on here by GDG Milano and GDG Cloud Milano together, with 365 people signed up.

Two rooms running in parallel from nine in the morning to half six in the evening, a badge in the shape of a button with the Duomo on it, talks split between Android, cloud, web, AI and the human side of the job, lunch in a box on the grass of the park next door — and, at the end of the afternoon, a hundred and fifty developers arranged on that same grass to be photographed by a drone.

• DevFest
• Android
• Jetpack Compose
• Gemini
• AI tooling
• Google Cloud
• Web
• GDG Italia
• Milano

Fourteen DevFest seasons

DevFest is not one conference: it is a season. Every autumn the GDG chapters each run their own, in their own city, under the same name — and Milano's is one of several hundred.

1. 2012 Worldwide The first DevFest season: 77 events, 41 countries, 14,000 developers
2. 2013 Worldwide 160+ DevFests across 63 countries the year after
3. 2021 Worldwide Tenth season: 450+ events, 90+ countries, 500,000 developers
4. 2024 Milano, Randstad Box 23 November, 276 signed up — the previous Milano edition
5. 2025 Milano, Randstad Box 11 October, 365 signed up — this one

Randstad Box

The venue is a co-working and event space on the southern edge of Milano, with a park on one side and a car park on the other — and for one Saturday a DevFest Milano teardrop flag at the door, the GDG Italia banner hung inside against the windows, and the printed agenda propped up next to the entrance. Google-coloured poufs in the foyer, red creators lettering on the walls, and rooms that on any other day are meeting rooms.

The flag at the door, Duomo and all

The GDG Italia banner, against the park

Poufs in the foyer, in the right colours

The badge is a button

Registration hands you a round pin badge with the DevFest Milano 2025 artwork on it — the Duomo drawn out of coloured blocks — and the day starts with the two GDG chapters explaining, on the screen of a meeting room, who they actually are: a Google Developer Group is volunteers, the chapters are local, and the whole thing runs on people giving up a Saturday.

DevFest Milano 2025, in a button

"Who are we?" — the chapters, introducing themselves

Croissants, ducks and a swag swap

Before nine there is a table of croissants, a welcome desk staffed by volunteers in DevFest t-shirts, and the badges laid out in rows waiting to be handed over. The two things that turn out to be DevFest Milano's own: a swag swap table — a long white surface where you leave stickers you have and take stickers you do not — and a rubber duck in Google yellow, which arrived the night before in a shopping trolley, several hundred of them.

Breakfast, before nine

The welcome desk, first thing

The badges, waiting to be handed out

"Swag swap": leave one, take one

Somebody else’s laptop, eventually

The duck, among the stickers

Duck, and the banner behind it

The night before: a trolley of ducks

Android, in two talks

The two sessions I came for. Thomas Künneth on ten things you didn't know about Jetpack Compose modifiers — the part of Compose everybody uses all day and almost nobody reads the source of, order of application included. And the state of voice interactions on Android, which after the I/O keynote in May was a good moment to take stock of: what the platform actually offers today, past the demos.

"10 things you didn't know about Jetpack Compose modifiers"

"The State of Voice Interactions on Android"

The rest of the programme

Two GDG chapters fill a day between them, and the track ran much wider than Android: a W3C talk on accessibility that spent its time on who you are actually designing for — reading level, economic conditions, cultural background, belief — rather than on contrast ratios; a talk on open source, from "my journey" to the practical business of running a project of your own; the community slide with GDG Italia's chapters drawn across the map; and a good deal of web and cloud in the big navy room.

W3C: who you are designing for

Open source, from "my journey" to running your own

GDG Italia, chapter by chapter

Code on the big screen

From the back, every chair taken

One of three rooms, all afternoon

"Whoa!"

The small room, on poufs

A mobile team's AI toolbox

The talk that felt most like late 2025: someone standing up and showing, without ceremony, what the AI stack of a working mobile team looks like in practice. Claude Code for repo-wide analysis, agentic use and finding your way around code you did not write; Gemini Code Assist for completion; and Dust as an LLM wrapper with bots for whatever else the team asks. Three boxes on one slide, which two years earlier would have been a slide about opinions.

Claude Code, Gemini Code Assist, Dust

The room it was shown to

GDG Cloud Milano, in the side room

Exceptions, and unf*cking your mind

The rest of the track went wider than code. Lorenzo De Francesco, CTO at Azimut Marketplace, gave a practical guide to handling exceptions — a talk about error handling illustrated with a bushfire and a kangaroo, which is exactly the right register for a Saturday afternoon. And the fullest room of the day was for "Unf*ck your mind — how to build something great again", which is the kind of title that fills a room at four in the afternoon and, to its credit, delivered on it.

"Unf*ck your mind", to a full room

The third room: poufs, and a workshop

The exceptions talk, from the audience

Lunch, and a hundred and fifty people from above

Lunch was a stack of boxes and bottles handed out by volunteers in DevFest t-shirts, eaten sitting on the gravel and the grass of the park behind the building, in October sun. And then the tradition every DevFest has: everybody outside for the group photo, the GDG Italia banner held up at the front — except this one was taken with a drone, which lifts off the banner and pulls back until the whole crowd fits in the frame.

The group photo, from the drone

The same group photo, as a still

Lunch, one box each

The park behind the building, at one o’clock

The queue, at half twelve

The park, from the floor above

Lunch, with the tower behind it

DevFest Milano 2025 by GDG Milano and GDG Cloud Milano, Randstad Box, Via San Vigilio 5, Milano, 11 October 2025.