IT Lightning Talks: session #27

Friday 7 Nov 2025, 10:00 → 11:30 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 → 10:03 Welcome

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

2025.11_ITLT_session_27.pdf

2025.11_ITLT_session_27.pptx

10:03 → 10:10 My Experiences Hunting Vulnerabilities (and Why You Should Hunt Vulns. Too)

I spent the past year doing penetration testing on some popular projects, simply because I use them myself. I ended up finding quite a few interesting issues. I'll show off some of the issues I found, how I found them, and encourage you to look for some bugs yourself.

Speaker: Dawid Kulikowski (Twente Technical University (NL))

A year of hunting 0-days.pdf

A year of hunting 0-days.pptx

10:10 → 10:17 Discover Alternative Operating Systems for Phones

Android and iOS? They’re not the only options! Join me as we explore the fascinating world of alternative OSes and find out which ones shine in different situations.

Speaker: Antoine Duparay (CERN)

alternative-mobile-os.pdf

https://e.foundation/

Ubuntu Touch

10:17 → 10:24 From Source to OCI: Comparing S2I and Paketo Buildpacks

Building OCI images efficiently is at the core of modern cloud-native workflows. In this lightning talk, I’ll compare two common approaches - Source-to-Image (S2I) and Paketo Buildpacks - focusing on how they construct OCI images, their trade-offs in transparency, reproducibility, and developer experience, and what this means in practice. I’ll briefly illustrate our experience applying both methods to Python (acc-py) environments and how these images integrate with a Knative-based platform at CERN.

Speaker: Alexandra Murariu

lightning2.pdf

lightning2.pptx

10:24 → 10:31 Self-healing URLs

A while back, a Laravel (PHP framework) news blog post caught my attention: it discussed the concept and implementation of "self-healing" URLs. I wanted to expand on the idea and play around with it in Flask, and after many weekends later, I developed a Python package for this.

Speaker: Dominic Hollis

PyPI: flask-selfheal

selfheal-pres.pdf

10:31 → 10:38 Metaprogramming in Scala

Metaprogramming enables writing code that generates or transforms other code, unlocking powerful abstractions and opportunities for compile-time optimizations. This talk explores the metaprogramming framework offered by the Scala 3 programming language through concrete examples.

Speaker: Florian Cassayre (CERN)

Metaprogramming in Scala.pdf

Repository

10:38 → 10:45 Designing Yet anOther hardware Description Language (YODL)

Over the past few months, I set out to understand how hardware designs can be expressed through software — by building my own Hardware Description Language, YODL.
In this talk, I’ll share what I learned along the way, from translating high-level circuit descriptions to the low-level representations that ultimately run on FPGAs.

Speaker: Nathan Soufflet

Github repository

Yodl.pdf

10:45 → 10:52 Connect Anything to AI in a Unified Way - by Creating Your Own MCP Server

LLMs are smart but isolated. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) lets them connect to real-world data and services in a unified way. I’ll demonstrate how simple it is to build your own MCP Server, with CERN’s Indico as the example.

Speaker: Elizaveta Ragozina (CERN)

Indico mcp server (public events only)

MCP_Talk.pdf