DORS/CLUC, Croatia’s developers and DevOps conference, held its 31st edition on April 24th and 25th in Zagreb. Two editions were skipped during COVID, which means the conference is actually 33 years old as an idea. That’s older than a lot of the software it was built to celebrate.
I was one of the speakers this year. I’m really proud of that. DORS/CLUC is an institution, and I got to stand at the front of the room.
The talk
My talk was called “Documentation Is Not Dead: It’s the Seed of Everything.” The central argument: AI doesn’t make documentation obsolete. It makes it more necessary. AI systems learn from what humans write. The Unix and Linux world understood this from the beginning. Man pages, HOWTOs, The Linux Documentation Project. Documentation wasn’t an afterthought there. It was part of the philosophy. If we stop writing, we stop feeding the well that everything else draws from.
I started the talk with my high school thesis from 1997: a 77-page Linux manual I wrote for the students who would come after me. I had no idea that “technical writer” was a job title. I just thought someone should write it down.
The programme
Two full days, around 20 speakers, five keynotes. Topics ranged from open source security and 0-day vulnerabilities, through AI-assisted software engineering and vibe coding, to real-world data scraping projects and the future of open source governance in the age of AI. The thread running through most of it was the same question the whole community is sitting with right now: what does AI actually change, and what stays the same.
The rest of it
The best part of a conference like this is always the hallway. I ran into people I hadn’t seen in years and picked up conversations that had been on pause since the last time we were in the same room. I also met a few people I’d only known from their online presence until now. Names that had been just profile photos suddenly had faces and a handshake attached.
Kudos to the organizers. Keeping something like this alive for 33 years, through everything, is not a small thing.
See you next year.