_By Maurizio Argoneto and Francesco di Donato @francesco_didonato_d1f65 _
How do you organize a tech conference that isn't just the usual sequence of slides in a dark hotel room? GDG Basilicata answered that question by bringing 66 developers to La Majonica, a forest in the municipality of Tito (PZ, Italy), for the third edition of DevFest — rebranded for the day as "DevForest".
But the real innovation wasn't just the location. The event broke the classic format by introducing a single, fascinating constraint: technical interdependence. Instead of isolated workshops, the entire day had one global goal — build a working smart greenhouse, live, piece by piece, across different teams.
Here's how we merged Botany, IoT, 3D Printing, Cloud computing, and Generative AI into a single, functioning pipeline.
The morning was dedicated to five 30-minute talks. These weren't just theoretical presentations — they were actual technical contracts: each speaker handed over the exact specifications (JSON formats, endpoints, physical tolerances) that their group had to respect during the afternoon Build Sprint, so the whole system could talk to itself.
