Codemotion Milan 2025: Highlights and Reflections

Last week I had the chance to attend Codemotion Milan 2025, and honestly, it was a blast. Picture hundreds of developers, designers, and tech enthusiasts buzzing around packed rooms, debating over coffee, and getting genuinely excited about new ideas. It felt like the perfect mix of community, curiosity, and caffeine.

The schedule was stacked with everything from frontend magic to backend mysteries, and testing strategies to AI, DevOps, and software architecture. After two days of sessions, demos, and hallway chats, a few talks really stuck with me; for their substance, their delivery, and the sparks they set off in my brain.

Your Testing Strategy is Broken: Let’s Fix It! by Luise Freese

Luise Freese is an amazing speaker, funny but insightful (and it doesn’t hurt that she likes pink and unicorns). I had the pleasure of seeing her speak last year, so I was really looking forward to her session this time around. In this talk she took a refreshing look at what’s wrong with how we usually approach testing. Her point was simple but powerful: stop testing everything just for the sake of it. Aiming for 100% coverage sounds good on paper, but often just creates a mountain of useless unit tests that never actually catch the things that break in production.

Luise argued for a smarter, leaner approach — fewer tests, but better ones. Focus on how your system behaves under pressure, on integration points, on what your users will actually notice when things go wrong. As she put it, users don’t care how many tests you’ve written; they care that the software works.

It was one of those talks that make you rethink your day to day habits. I left the room thinking less about coverage reports and more about value.

Baseline Rhapsody: A Tale of Style & Motion by Emiliano Pisu

Emiliano Pisu’s talk was basically a love letter to modern CSS, and heaven knows if we need more CSS love in the developer community. He took us on a journey from the wild days of floats and tables to the sleek, expressive world of container queries, scroll-driven animations, and CSS custom properties. His main message: we’re living in a golden age of frontend styling, and we should start acting like it.

He introduced the new Baseline standard, a sort of “truth table” for web features that tells you what’s safe to use across browsers right now. No more endless guessing games or praying to the compatibility gods.

What I loved most was Emiliano’s mix of technical depth and creative energy. He made CSS feel exciting again, and honestly, I walked out wanting to rebuild half our design system just to play with the new toys.

ChromeDevTools: Are You Confident in Your Expertise? by Luca Del Puppo

This talk was like discovering hidden cheat codes in a game you’ve been playing for years. Luca Del Puppo took something every JavaScript dev uses daily, Chrome DevTools, and showed us just how much more it can do when you dig deep.

He demoed advanced debugging tricks, performance profiling, and how to uncover sneaky issues like layout thrashing and memory leaks. It wasn’t just a feature tour, it was a hands on masterclass in how to actually think with your tools.

What made it memorable was Luca’s energy and real-world examples. You could tell he’s spent countless hours battling tough bugs, and he made us feel like we could take on anything with DevTools as our sidekick. I walked away with a bunch of new debugging tricks and a renewed appreciation for a tool I thought I’d already mastered.

Prompt Strategies: Useful for AI (and Maybe for Everyday Life) by Francesco Sciuti

Right before my train home, I managed to squeeze in part of Francesco Sciuti’s workshop “Prompt Strategies: utile per l’AI e (forse) anche per l’uso quotidiano”, which roughly translates to “Prompt Strategies: useful for AI (and maybe also for everyday life).”

It was less of a formal talk and more of a round table conversation. Francesco walked us through how to write prompts that actually make AI behave, how to get the answers you want, in the format you need, without the weird hallucinations or vague replies we’ve all seen. He shared practical examples, frameworks for structuring prompts clearly, and even a few thoughts on Context Engineering. Basically, how to give an AI the right background to think straight.

Sadly, I had to leave halfway through to catch my train, but what I saw was genuinely enlightening. It wasn’t just about AI — it was about communication, precision, and how phrasing things clearly can make all the difference, whether you’re prompting a model or just talking to your team. Best new term of the year coined by Francesco: Vibe Prototyping, instead of the old Vibe Coding, which better represents how we can approach AI interactions in a more purposeful and cooperative way.

What Made These Talks Stand Out

Looking back, the sessions that I liked more had a few things in common. They were practical, grounded, and a little opinionated, the kind of talks that give you ideas to try the next morning, not just slides to bookmark and forget that are more like someone reading the documentation to you instead of explaining a new concept with their own voice and thoughts. They also had a strong personal touch — you could tell the speakers were passionate about their topics, and that enthusiasm was contagious.

Codemotion Milan 2025 nailed that vibe. It wasn’t about chasing buzzwords or hyping the latest framework. It was about building better software, with intention and creativity.

Overall, the event was a brilliant reminder that learning in tech doesn’t have to be dry or intimidating. It can be lively, surprising, and even a little fun. The mix of talks, workshops, and casual conversations made it clear that the heart of any tech community is curiosity, collaboration, and a willingness to experiment. And Codemotion Milan 2025 had all of that and even more.