SnowCamp 2025
Translated from the French original, first published on LinkedIn.
Written in 2025: some details may have changed since.
For once, let’s start by putting ourselves in the shoes of tech event organizers. Like many other conferences this year, Snowcamp struggled to find sponsors. So first of all, a very warm thank you to those who stayed loyal.
It’s a real problem, and it has already led other conferences to be cancelled. These events are our best way to learn, share, challenge our points of view and broaden our horizons. Let’s hope it’s only temporary; in the meantime, we want to give our full support to the organizers, who do an amazing job, as volunteers!
Now on to our takeaways from a few of the talks we attended with Anaïs M. and Jérôme Tama.
Thursday kicks off with a technical dissection of the XZ Utils backdoor by Quentin Dunand and Wassim Ahmed-Belkacem. They walk us through, step by step, how the backdoor was put in place. The talk is lively, and the step-by-step explanation makes the engineering behind it very clear.
Next up is Jérôme Tama, who invites us to take (or retake) our… refactoring license! We discover how OpenRewrite works and how it lets you make large-scale code changes simply and automatically.
Loic Gudet then gives a live demo of a generative AI prototype themed around the “Paris 2024 Olympic Games”. Among other things, it’s a concrete way to show how user feedback is used to improve the answers, what it costs to maintain these AIs, and which tools are used to measure their effectiveness. An insightful talk to understand everything that goes into building a generative AI.
In the same slot, Paul Vulliemin and Mélissa Pinon share how they manage their teams’ development environments with a cloud solution, focusing on resource elasticity and fast onboarding for developers. After comparing the options they considered, they show us the one they picked, Coder, and how they rolled it out, with a demo of the tool’s features and its IDE integrations.
After these talks, it’s my turn to give my own talk, on SOPS, where I show how this tool can help you store your secrets securely in your Git repositories, even without access to an external Secret Manager or Vault.
After lunch, Léo Gatellier and 🚀 Tim Ghibaudo give us an unfiltered account of their 3 years spent maintaining their Kubernetes cluster: what worked well and what still needs improving. With the goal of making development teams autonomous, they explain how they automated recurring tasks with scripts, CLIs and/or APIs to reduce manual work, while still meeting the ops team’s security requirements. Léo and Tim also stress that the biggest change isn’t just technical but organizational, and therefore needs proper support to succeed.
In the same slot, Olivier Leplus and Yohan Lasorsa present more than 10 web features (with a soft spot for number 9 ¾), some of them available for years, little known and yet capable of making our lives easier. Whether it’s handling arrays or centering a div efficiently… this talk offers solutions to everyday problems.
To close the day, Anaïs M. takes the stage on a topic that is too rarely discussed, positive discrimination, sharing her own experiences and feelings and showing that although progress has been made, there is still a lot left to do!
These 2 days of conferences were a chance to discover new things but also to talk with many people, whether at the speakers’ dinner or over a coffee between talks. Thanks to everyone, attendees and speakers alike, for these great conversations!
We’d also like to thank Bruno Lavit for the wonderful photos he took during this edition. And finally, a big thank you to Onepoint for enabling us to share our experience at these events!