tl;dr
I attended Grazer Linuxtage 2025 and talked about building better REST APIs with Django, DRF ad OpenAPI. Also I share my thoughts on the event and what I learned during the event.
This year I attended again the second day of Grazer Linuxtage in Graz, Austria. This has become a yearly Tradition for me, as the City of Graz is not that far away from where I live (currently 2 hours by Intercitybus, next year it should be even less with the new railway line). The quality of the talks was always very good and the event is always extraordinary well organized, you can see this also in my previous post.
For the first time this year I also submitted three proposals to talk at the event, and fortunately one got accepted in the lineup.
My talk was called "Building Better APIs: From Django to Client Libraries with OpenAPI" and was held on Saturday 26 April 2025 at 10:00 AM. The talk is focused on how to automate the process of creating API documentation using OpenAPI specification and generating client libraries automatically. It covers the basics of OpenAPI, how to use tools like Swagger UI to generate interactive documentation, and how to integrate OpenAPI into your development workflow to create client libraries for different programming languages. The final part is taking a look on compatibility and how to use OpenAPI to ensure that your APIs stay compatible over time for all clients.
The Slides are available here. The talk itself was recorded and is available here.
After the talk I had some interesting discussions with other attendees, and was also happy that the talk was well received. Some of them were focused on the flows used to automate the pipelines, others were related to Django and why would I prefer it over FastAPI or Flask. In general I think there is no right answer to this question, but it depends on the specific requirements of the project and the team's expertise.
Next I attended some of the other Talks myself, here are some highlights:
- Thomas Lohninger - Keynote: Netzpolitischer Wetterbericht - Video: A very interesting view over the current state of the politics related to the internet and its future
- Hans-Jürgen Schönig - PostgreSQL Security und Compliance von A-Z - Video: What is complience, why you needs it and what are the most common certifications and standards. Some examples in PostgreSQL of configurations and plugins to help with complience.
- Patrick Koch - Die Einführung einer Cloud-Adoption-Strategie für ein großes Unternehmen in der Automobilindustrie - Video: A journey of the Azure Cloud addoption of AVL, and how they used Kubernetes and Terraform to manage the infrastructure.
- Mario-Leander Reimer - Von Multi-Cluster bis Hybrid-Cloud: Flexibles Kubernetes-Scheduling mit Karmada - Video: A deep dive into Karmada, a Kubernetes-native multi-cluster management system that allows users to deploy applications across multiple clusters and cloud providers.
- Christian Trenkwalder - Safety ja, Security nein. Analyse eines breit eingesetzten Einsatzmanagmentsystems - Video: A sad story on how a company failed to secure their mobile app, how the issues were discovered and why fixing them took so long.
- Martin Leyrer - IT Fails in Österreich. Ein Update - Video: A talk about the most important IT failures in Austria from 2022 to 2025. The talk is very entertaining and full of satire, but really shows the importance of security in IT.
The talks I attended were focused on security, cloud computing, and DevOps topics. They were all very informative and provided valuable insights into these areas. Especially I want to highlight the talk of Christian Trenkwalder as it was very well prepared, and with each slide he uncovered more of the security issues of a mobile app and the process of finding the people that are responsible for fixing them.
Conclusion
Overall, I enjoyed attending Grazer Linuxtage 2025 and I was a new experience for me to be on the other side of the podium. I am looking forward to attending next year and hopefully my ideas will be accepted again.
I also want to highlight the great work of the organizers and volunteers who make this event possible every year. Every year I'm again impressed by the media team and their ability to put the recording together so quickly, even during the event.