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

I spent the day at DevFest Jos 2026, hosted by Google Developer Groups Jos. The hall was full, the setup was beautiful, and the talks were practical. I left with a lot of notes and, more importantly, a few ideas that changed how I think about building software.

Why do events like this matter? You can learn a tool from documentation or a tutorial. What you can't get from a screen is the way a good talk shapes your thinking ability. Seeing how experienced engineers frame problems, what they worry about and what they refuse to compromise on changes how you approach your own work. That was my biggest takeaway from the day.

The session that set the tone for me was Umar Faruq Zubairu's talk, "Beyond 5G: Engineering Low-Latency USSD & Voice Workflows with FastAPI & Cloud Run." Umar is a Google Developer Expert in Cloud & AI. The title says a lot. In many of our markets, USSD and voice are still how millions of people reach digital services, so building for them is a real engineering challenge, not a legacy side project. When a session times out in seconds, latency is part of the user experience. Pairing FastAPI with Cloud Run showed a practical way to build fast, scalable services for exactly these channels.

One of the clearest ideas of the day was a pyramid with three layers for thinking about APIs. Contract: what consumers see. Compatibility: how the contract evolves. Infrastructure: how you make it fast and reliable. I like this framing because it puts things in order. Before you worry about scale, you need a clear contract. Before you ship changes, you need to know who you might break. The infrastructure layer only matters once the layers above it are solid. I'll be using this as a checklist on my next project.

If one slide got the room nodding, it was this one: "Works on localhost" is not a production strategy. You cannot scale what you cannot observe. Every developer has said "but it works on my machine." The point is that shipping isn't the finish line. Without logs, metrics and visibility into how your system behaves under real traffic, you're guessing. Observability isn't something to add later. It's part of building the thing.

Taiwo Famakinde, a Senior Software Engineer, closed out my sessions with "Building Production Tool-Calling Pipelines with Gemini." Letting an AI model call tools is easy to demo and hard to run reliably. The talk's focus on production pipelines echoed the theme of the day: it's not enough for something to work once, it has to keep working at scale, and you have to be able to see what it's doing.

Thank you to GDG Jos, the organizers, the sponsors including Startup Lab, and everyone who made DevFest Jos 2026 happen. The talks were different, but the message was the same: build things that are well designed, observable and ready for the real world. I'm leaving with new ideas, new connections and a sharper way of thinking. See you at the next one. 🚀