At the Center of Excellence we organized DEV Night 2025, an event that brought together local tech enthusiasts, developers, and community members. The program included four presentations from different perspectives and of varying intensity, giving the evening a balanced mix of personal experiences, technical content, and real-world industry examples.

Relaxed, Interesting, Inspiring

The evening was opened by Mirta Kardum, a full-stack developer who confessed it was her first talk — even though you would never guess it. She spoke about her professional journey, the challenges she faced, and her thoughts on developing a career in the tech sector.

Although there weren’t many students in the audience, we recommend that anyone reading this check out our YouTube channel, where Mirta’s talk will soon be available, as well the rest of the talks.

She highlighted how attending events like DEV Night and connecting with people helped her ultimately land her first job.

Today she works at SWING Consulting, another proud member company of Split Tech City.

Vedran Lebo provided a practical and highly useful insight into an increasingly important question — when cloud really makes sense, and when organizations opt for a return to on-premise or hybrid solutions. From a DevOps perspective, he explained what drives cloud repatriation, what the return process looks like, and what technical and organizational preparations precede such decisions.

Although you might not expect AI to be fun, Mojmir Novaković got a few laughs from the audience while talking about artificial intelligence. He especially reflected on his own experience building AI infrastructure, and the changes brought by the Gemini 3 model, emphasizing it as a turning point in modern AI development.

His talk gave insight into the evolution of the field and the challenges researchers and engineers face.

The final talk was delivered by Mladen Macanović, who shared how his weekend project grew into a globally used framework that today supports hundreds of companies worldwide. He discussed what it truly means to manage an open-source project that is used daily by a large community, including motivation, challenges, the pressure of GitHub issues, and the lessons he learned developing his project from a hobby into an almost full-time commitment.

At that point, there was no more formal time left, so visitors were able to ask him questions during the relaxed gathering that followed, with pizza and Trapula beer.

But That’s Not All

DEV Night 2025 confirmed the importance of such meetups for the development of the local tech scene and sparked expectations for future editions. Antonio Šerić, the initiator of DEV Night, mentioned at the end that next year they will try to hold at least two events. The idea was supported by everyone in the room.

Thank you all for coming and for your active participation. See you at the next one!