Speaking at AIDevCon India (2025)
A full auditorium, a live DevSecOps demo running on stage, and a friend standing at the door taking photos he was not supposed to be there for.
26 March 2025. NIMHANS Convention Center, Bengaluru.
First time on a stage this size. A full auditorium.
I had been speaking at college events and meetups for a while, but those are small rooms. This was a different order of magnitude.
The talk
"Accelerating DevSecOps with AI: Success Stories and Practical Examples."
The deck was mine and it did not look like anyone else's there. That mattered more than I expected, because a room that has sat through forty talks notices the one that looks different.
I started a little fast. I could hear it. Then somewhere in the first few minutes it settled into rhythm and stayed there.
The demo
I did not want to only talk about AI in security pipelines. I wanted the room to watch it happen.
Static analysis running live against a deliberately vulnerable application. Cross-site scripting, arbitrary file write through archive extraction, the findings coming up on screen with paths and line numbers while I talked through what an AI-assisted pipeline does with them.
262 issues found. 24 High, 28 Medium, 210 Low.That is the difference between telling a room that automated security assessment works and letting them watch it work.
Imran
I had asked my friend Imran to come.
His pass was community, which meant Hall A. I was speaking in Hall B at 4:30, and he had no access to that room at all.
He stood at the door anyway, outside the hall he was not allowed into, and took photographs of me presenting.
The organisers had photographers. There was no shortage of pictures of that stage. That is not the point.
Somebody I know stood at a door he was not supposed to be at, to take photos nobody asked him for. That is what support actually looks like, and it is the thing I remember most clearly from the day.
The photo at the top of this post is one of his.
Two rounds
At the end they clapped. Then I gave the closing statement, and they clapped again.
First time that has happened to me. Two rounds, not one.
The organisers, EFY Group, sent me off with goodies. Imran and I stayed for sessions and workshops, met people, and made connections that were worth the trip on their own.
I was working at Hysteresis as a DevSecOps engineer at the time. I had spent years wanting to say something on a stage that size, and this was the first time the thing I wanted to say and the room to say it in showed up together.