Ashutosh Pandey delivered a talk where they explored the field of compiler technology. He discussed everything like how beginners could get started to the exciting research problems currently being tackled in the field. He outlined how compilers power modern tech in unexpected places and shared information about community events across India.

Ashutosh Pandey delivered a talk as to how compiler technology is everywhere powering everything from Android and Postgres to AI frameworks like PyTorch. He outlined how most modern systems rely on LLVM to bridge the gap between software and hardware and how right now is the best time for the field. He also talked about the problems for the people to work on like automatic parallelisation, phase ordering, Program Synthesis, Automatic Compiler Verification, Polyhedral Optimization. At the end he gave a brief introduction to the LLVM monorepo and provided a roadmap for beginners to join this field.

Akash Singh and Dhruv Puri dove deep into the building blocks every modern engineer needs: Linux fundamentals, Git workflows, version control best practices, branching strategies, CI/CD pipelines, containerization with Docker, cloud-native infrastructure, and DevOps culture as a whole. They also talked about about building first-principles problem-solving skills, reading documentation, understanding your git diffs, and why knowing what's happening under the hood matters.

Akash Singh and Pratik Singh delivered a talk on "Reducing AWS Glue Bills by 25x Using Airflow," where they shared a favorite infrastructure success story as to how they slashed their AWS Glue costs from $10,000/month → $400/month across 80 ETL pipelines leading to a 96% cost reduction. This was done by migrating to Apache Airflow on EKS but the beauty of airflow lets you run it with n number of connectors / any platform!. It was a great session highlighting how smart architecture and the right tools can drive incredible efficiency and cost savings.

At the CSS Workshop co-located with the FSTTCS Conference in Goa, Ashutosh Pandey presented an experimental investigation into the reliability of LLM-generated C code. The talk demonstrated that security-aware prompting alone does not consistently prevent crashes or unsafe behaviors, and analyzed how factors such as prompt structure, example guidance, temperature, and programming language choice influence model failure patterns. The presentation highlighted deeper concerns around robustness, evaluation methodology, and the limits of prompt-based safeguards in safety-critical code generation contexts.

During the CSS Workshop at the FSTTCS Conference, Kamini Banait, Madhur Kumar, and Prajwal K P delivered a research-focused talk exploring the behavior and analytical consequences of intermediate representations generated by tools like Ghidra and P-code. The session dissected structural and semantic variations across IRs, discussed their relevance to binary analysis and lifting accuracy, and reflected on the complexities of translating machine-level constructs into analyzable abstractions. Their work sparked technical discussions on correctness, abstraction fidelity, and security analysis strategies.

Pratik Singh spoke about the evolving landscape of CI/CD where continuous code quality becomes a core focus, especially with AI becoming an integral part of developer toolchains. He explored how modern CI/CD pipelines can integrate automated AI-driven quality checks — from intelligent code suggestions and static analysis to vulnerability detection and test automation — to improve software reliability and reduce manual QA overhead. Singh highlighted the challenges and opportunities of combining AI with traditional DevOps practices to create feedback-rich, quality-centric deployment workflows.

Pratik Singh delivered a practical session on transforming common Terraform pitfalls into robust, policy-compliant Infrastructure as Code using GitOps and KCL (Kubernetes Configuration Language). He walked through how teams can leverage KCL to validate Terraform plans against organizational policies early in the development lifecycle, enforce least-privilege resource definitions, and prevent misconfigurations that lead to security or compliance issues. The talk emphasized integrating this validation into GitOps workflows to automate error detection, improve governance, and increase confidence in IaC deployments.

Ashutosh Pandey delivered an engaging session on growing a specialized tech community around compilers, programming languages, and systems from small beginnings to nearly 2000 engaged members. He shared strategies for community building, including regular meetups, active collaboration, inclusive engagement practices, and leveraging online platforms to sustain momentum. Through real-world anecdotes and lessons learned, the talk highlighted how consistency, clear purpose, and supportive environments can help scale niche technical communities effectively, inspiring contributors to connect, learn, and grow together.

Pratik Singh delivered a talk on reducing the operational burden of platform engineers by leveraging Argo CD together with reusable Kustomize templates. He outlined how template-driven configuration can cut down on repetitive YAML creation and how combining this with Argo CD’s GitOps model allows teams to standardize application deployments while enabling self-service onboarding. The session explained the role of App Project RBAC in empowering developers to customize and deploy applications independently, improving consistency, productivity, and predictability across Kubernetes deployment workflows.