IT Lightning Talks: session #28

Friday 22 May 2026, 10:00 → 11:40 Europe/Zurich

31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre (CERN)

Elizaveta Ragozina (CERN), Pedro Ferreira (CERN), Sebastian Lopienski (CERN), Hugo Gonzalez Labrador (CERN)

IT Lightning Talks (ITLT) are short presentations on any topic related to computing technology or to the IT department. See more here: https://twiki.cern.ch/IT/LightningTalks/

10:00 → 10:04 Welcome

Speakers: Elizaveta Ragozina (CERN), Hugo Gonzalez Labrador (CERN), Pedro Ferreira (CERN), Sebastian Lopienski (CERN)

2026.22.05_ITLT_session_28.pdf

2026.22.05_ITLT_session_28.pptx

10:04 → 10:11 I ❤️-athons: Hackathon, Ideathon & Datathon

What actually happens at a hackathon, ideathon, or datathon and why do people keep joining them? I share my experience participating in different kinds of tech competitions and how each one pushed me to think differently. From building AI prototypes, to turning ideas into business pitches, to working with messy real-world data, these events helped me connect what I learned in research and work to real problems and fast-paced teamwork. My goal is to show that you don’t need to have everything figured out to join sometimes the best learning happens when you just start building.

Speaker: Nursena Bitirgen (CERN)

…...OH NO!.pdf

What actually happens at a hackathon, ideathon, or datathon  and why do people keep joining them? I share my experience participating in different kinds of tech competitions and how each one pushed me to think differently. From building AI prototypes, to turning ideas into business pitches, to working with messy real-world data, these events helped me connect what I learned in research and work to real problems and fast-paced teamwork. My goal is to show that you don’t need to have everything figured out to join  sometimes the best learning happens when you just start building.

10:11 → 10:18 Autonomic infrastructure: why and how

Who enjoys planning the replacement of a host in your homelab or datacenter?
You could spend your afternoon having a nice walk in the park and sipping cappuccino, but you're stuck installing your OS, configuring DHCP leases, running puppet, and managing VLANs.
Enter autonomic computing: a self-configuring, self-healing way to manage your infrastructure.

Speaker: Mario Vitale (CERN)

AutonomicInfrastructure.pdf

10:18 → 10:25 Commit better, fight less

Tired of red CIs over formatting and linting? pre-commit catches those issues locally before you even push, so your pipeline stays green and your team stays sane.

Speaker: Luis Pigueiras (CERN)

Commit_better_fight_less.pdf

10:23 → 10:30 Handling 1000's of alerts using LLMs

Babysitting a handful of servers can be fun. But doing that with 5000? Nope. Who wants to deal with a daily stream of software and hardware alarms?

So what do you do? You automate, of course. And a year later you realize your automation code has gotten quite complex, despite not covering all the cases you've spotted. You just need to extend it further to handle more alarms, more faults, more edge cases. But you know there's no end to this and it will inevitably turn the code into a mess.

So what do you do? Naturally, the though crosses your mind: what if you used an LLM ?

Speaker: Panagiotis Gkonis (CERN)

handling_alarms_with_llm.pdf

10:30 → 10:37 No practice? No problem! - An Intro to Live Coding

Electronic music has a long history of breaking down barriers and empowering creators who were once sidelined by traditional music culture. With samplers, synthesizers and sequencers, making music became cheaper, faster, and more spontaneous than ever. Live coding is a recent development in this history, and one whose full impact we are yet to experience.
In this talk, I’ll introduce you to the fundamentals of live coding, with the hope that you’ll be inspired to dive in and start experimenting for yourself!

Speaker: Pedro Ferreira (CERN)

Demo Source Code

Strudel boilerplate project

10:37 → 10:44 Developer Productivity Engineering from the Trenches

Keeping large projects that need to be running for decades alive (like EDH), and easy to develop, is quite a challenge. Add to that the fact that projects and databases are shared between 80+ engineers in around 13 teams, and you have a recipe for chaos. Recently, the business computing group has been devoting some time and energy to streamline the developer experience. We're using a combination of tools and techniques that help both the newcomer and the seasoned developer, both in their day to day and in the critical moments of production incidents.

I'll be sharing with you some of these insights, things we use to keep everything together, while still consistently shipping features for our stakeholders.

Speaker: Cristian Schuszter (CERN)

Developer Productivity Engineering from the Trenches.pdf

10:44 → 10:51 Open Mic

Speaker: Avikant Srivastava

10:51 → 11:21 Discussion, Coffee & Croissants