Inside DevConf 2025: Lessons, trends, and technical highlights

Rodney Ncane, senior React developer at BET Software

What were some of the biggest themes or talking points at DevConf 2025?

My top four highlights were:

• The keynote, which was titled ‘The Next Decade of Software Development’. It emphasised balancing rapid innovation with sustainable practices as teams and codebases scale.
  
• The session ‘Functional Programming: The Secret Ingredient in YuppieChef’s Recipe of Success’ which showed how immutability and pure functions helped YuppieChef reduce bugs and simplify large-scale refactors.
  
• ‘Cracking the Code Review’ which demonstrated that lightweight linting, automated checks, and pairing transform reviews into collaborative learning rather than gatekeeping.
  
• ‘It’s Not CSS, It’s YOU’ which reframed front-end styling issues as opportunities for cross-team collaboration using shared component libraries and design tokens.

Did any sessions challenge how you approach your work as a senior React developer?

Yes, definitely. The session ‘Functional Programming’ explored language-agnostic principles, primarily demonstrated in Java, helping me grasp immutability and pure functions across different stacks, not just in React. The session ‘It’s Not CSS, It’s YOU’ made me rethink how I collaborate with designers on styled components and utility classes, emphasising shared style tokens to avoid ‘CSS blame games’ and keep UI consistency.

Lastly, the session ‘In Case of Emergency – Managing an Outage’ reminded me that in our high-paced BET Software environment, we need to act like first responders, treat incident response as a team sport (removing fear and blame), collaborate and share information, set up robust monitoring and alerts, and rely on clear runbooks, automated rollbacks, and regular drills.

If you could implement one insight from DevConf into every team using React, what would it be?

I’d say embed a ‘Writing Better Code’ mindset in React teams. This means adopt domain‐driven component structures, enforce ‘tidy first’ principles (low coupling, high cohesion), and practice TDD, using heuristics to keep components small and simple, so that every React team writes clean, maintainable code with minimal cognitive overload.

After attending the conference, which took place during Africa Month, can you share two takeaways on what developments we should be watching out for as a continent, before DevConf 2026 rolls around?

• Accelerating AI‐driven healthcare: The ‘Accelerating Medical Insight’ session showed how retrieval‐augmented generation (RAG) and LLMs can dramatically speed up diagnosis and research. We must watch out for African start-ups and research institutions deploying these systems to address local public health challenges (e.g. mining regional medical data to improve early detection of endemic diseases).

• Expansion of regional cloud and connectivity infrastructure: These discussions around resilient architectures and outage management underscored the need for robust back-ends. In the next year, keep an eye on new data centres coming online in Africa, plus investments in undersea cables and edge networks, this will enable lower latency, better monitoring/alerting, and more reliable platforms across industries.

What advice would you give to junior React devs or students, based on what you saw and heard at DevConf 2025?

Junior React developers should focus on building solid habits around clean, maintainable code and collaboration. Start by writing components that do one thing well, break complex UIs into small, focused pieces and give them clear names. Embrace code reviews as opportunities to learn; pay attention to feedback on style, structure, and testing, and don’t hesitate to ask questions if something isn’t clear.

From the beginning, write simple tests alongside your components to ensure your code behaves as expected and to catch mistakes early. Work closely with designers and teammates to agree on shared styling and component conventions, so everyone stays aligned and avoids last-minute style fixes.

Finally, develop an awareness of how your code runs in production, learn basic monitoring tools and think about how you would diagnose a problem in a live environment. This mindset will help you write code that’s easier to debug and maintain in a fast-moving, high-pressure team.