GitHub Copilot DevDays Dubai - AI is Your Copilot, You Are Still the Driver
This weekend I had the pleasure of speaking at GitHub Copilot DevDays, organized by the Azure Middle East community at Coders HQ in Dubai.
The event featured a lineup of friends and fellow speakers: Hatim Nagarwala, Ahmad Uzair (always great to share a stage with you again!), Ben Leane, Yellampalli Venkatesh, Dr. S. Gomathi, and Moiz Lokhandwala. It was a day packed with news on GitHub Copilot, and I left with plenty of notes.
This was the first time I gave my talk “AI is Your Copilot – You Are Still the Driver”. The talk centers around the importance of code reviewing both in person and automatically using your AI tools.
This is not only to make sure the right patterns and practices were put in place but to know that you are delivering quality. I also got to demonstrate how asking AI to code review itself over and over can massively improve the code quality. The trick is writing a prompt that targets security, readability, edge cases, or whatever matters most for your context. Doing so consistently improves the quality of what you get back. It’s a small habit that makes a real difference, and it keeps you in the driver’s seat rather than just rubber-stamping whatever the AI produced.
This idea of asking an AI to review its own output I picked up from Johan Sanneblad at TokenTek. If you are not following him yet - you should!
We looked at tools that AI agents can share with users to make everyone’s life easier and fix things that are just annoying. One example was inconsistent coding styles, because honestly in the age of linters we should not have to review that in the first place.
I also demonstrated that good prompts can trump expensive models and showed that I can get good code review quality from GPT-5 Mini, actually even better than I get from a much more expensive model that is using a very basic code review prompt.
It was a great crowd, lots of questions and conversations that carried on well after the session ended, not to mention a lot of very nice feedback <3. That is always the sign of a good day.
🎤 Got an event and need a speaker? Invite me!
📅 Catch my upcoming talks:
- Apr 23, 2026 - DEVOXX GREECE 2026 in Athens, Greece: "But I Just Want to Write Code... Career Advice for Satisfied Developers"
- Jun 02, 2026 - DevSum 2026 in Stockholm, Sweden: "Workshop: Production-Ready Azure Functions: Build, Tune, and Scale High-Performance Serverless Apps"
- Jun 03, 2026 - DevSum 2026 in Stockholm, Sweden: "Azure Functions – Performance Sins and Their Penance"