DevFest Jos 2026 — Build, Secure, Scale: Developers and Builders in the Agentic Era

DevFest Jos 2026, hosted by GDG Jos, was a day of practical talks, a full hall, and a lot of notes. I walked out with more than inspiration — a few ideas that changed how I think about building software.

You can learn a tool from documentation or a tutorial. What you can't get from a screen is how experienced engineers frame problems, what they worry about, and what they refuse to compromise on. That was the real value of the day.

Umar Faruq Zubairu's session, "Beyond 5G: Engineering Low-Latency USSD & Voice Workflows with FastAPI & Cloud Run," set the tone. USSD and voice still connect millions of people to digital services in our markets. When a session times out in seconds, latency is part of the user experience — building fast, scalable services for these channels is real engineering, not a legacy side project.

The clearest idea I took away was a three-layer pyramid for APIs: contract, compatibility, infrastructure. First define what consumers see. Then understand how that contract evolves and who you might break. Only then optimize for speed and reliability. A useful checklist for the next project.

"Works on localhost" is not a production strategy. You cannot scale what you cannot observe. Logs, metrics, and visibility into real traffic aren't features to add later — observability is part of building the thing.

Taiwo Famakinde closed my sessions with "Building Production Tool-Calling Pipelines with Gemini." Letting a model call tools is easy to demo and hard to run reliably. That summed up the theme: it isn't enough for something to work once — it has to keep working at scale. Thank you to GDG Jos, the organizers, the sponsors, and everyone who made the day happen. See you at the next one.