Two Googlers, a paid ticket and 150-plus already signed up: DevFest Cyprus 2026 names its line-up for 31 October

The agenda that was "TBA" for weeks now has names on it. DevFest Cyprus 2026 — the island's edition of the community-run conference that Google Developer Groups hold worldwide each autumn — lands on Saturday 31 October 2026, 09:30–17:00, at the University of Nicosia (46 Makedonitissis, Nicosia), organised by GDG Cyprus.

Two Google engineers are flying in. Mete Atamel gives "Build with Antigravity", and Marina Coelho, a Developer Relations Engineer at Google, runs the afternoon's set-piece: a hands-on workshop, "Building AI Apps from Scratch with the Google Ecosystem", scheduled for roughly 13:30–15:30. Coelho's background is the reason that session is worth the seat — eight years as a software engineer before joining Firebase in developer relations, working on Android with the Firebase product set. This is a build-along, not a demo reel.

The local half of the bill. Talks on agentic engineering and AI governance, with speakers drawn from Plum, Bold.org and Eurobank. The pairing is the interesting choice: agentic engineering is the year's most over-promised topic, and putting a bank on the same stage to talk governance is a reasonable corrective.

Shape of the day. Registration and coffee from 09:30; keynote and tech sessions through the morning; a community lunch; the Google-led workshop in the early afternoon; closing remarks and networking to 17:00. Roughly two hours of the seven are hands-on and another two are unstructured — a sensible ratio for a single-track community day.

Who is behind it. The GDG Cyprus organising team: Maria Stylianou, Andreas Lefkatis, Marilyn Haber (Women Techmakers Ambassador), Jawaad Farooq and Maria Kruglova. Plum is Gold sponsor, with the Hack Cyprus Podcast and JetBrains as supporters.

One practical warning. This DevFest is ticketed, not free — a change worth noticing in a Cyprus calendar where most community tech events cost nothing, and worth checking before you turn up expecting a walk-in. Registration runs through gdg.community.dev, and the listing already shows 151 RSVPs. For a single-room, single-track event at a university venue, that number is close to the point where the door closes.

Where it sits in the week. The end of October is the island's densest stretch of the year. The Zubr Capital Young Hackathon runs 24 October, the 9th SkillsCyprus National Skills Competition occupies the State Fair 29–31 October, and Nicosia Tech Meetup has KUG Cyprus x CECG: Build, Test, Ship on 27 October — so DevFest shares its Saturday with the closing day of a national competition on the other side of Nicosia. After that the calendar tips into November and the fintech block: Wiki Finance Expo on the 6th, Plug and Play Cyprus Expo on the 11th, and the BoC Fintech Hackathon 7.0 on 27–29 November.