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This was a ninety-minute evening session at Howest, presented by Tim Van Roosbroeck and Dimitry Decan from Orbid. They walked us through five maturity levels of Infrastructure as Code, from clicking around in the Azure portal (level one, also known as "Click-Ops") all the way up to enterprise-grade automation with policy-driven governance. Having both a business consultant and a cloud engineer present gave the talk two useful perspectives: the why and the how.

This was a two-hour evening session at Howest, and it was all about DeepSeek, one of the most hyped open-source AI models to come out of China in 2025. Dimitri Casier, who teaches software development and AI at Howest, walked us through what makes DeepSeek different from GPT-4 and Claude, and whether the hype is actually justified. The room was packed with AI-curious students and a few people from industry.

This one was different from the usual Tech & Meet sessions. Instead of a deep technical dive, we got a mix of geopolitics and cybersecurity from someone who lived it. Martin De Pauw is a Royal Military Academy graduate who started on F16 avionics before moving into IT and cybersecurity at NATO Headquarters. He traced NATO's entire journey from digital uncertainty to cyber resilience: from the early days when cyber wasn't even on the radar, through the 2007 attacks on Estonia, all the way to 2016 when NATO officially recognized cyberspace as an operational domain alongside land, sea, and air.

I'll be honest: I walked into this one thinking IPv6 was still a "we'll deal with it eventually" problem. I walked out realizing it's a "we should've dealt with it already" problem. The speaker presented EU adoption data broken down by country and provider, showing how far behind some regions still are, and then went through the practical transition strategies: dual-stack, tunneling with 6to4 and Teredo, and NAT64 translation.

This was a ninety-minute evening session at Howest, presented by Thijs Pirmez, who specializes in Android and iOS development with a deep focus on Flutter. The first part was a general introduction to cross-platform app development: why you'd want to write one codebase instead of maintaining separate Android and iOS apps. Then the main presentation dove into Flutter itself: how its widget system works, the hot reload workflow, and how you integrate with native code and plugins.

This session was presented by ML6, a Belgian AI consultancy, and they clearly knew their stuff. The talk covered the whole open-source AI landscape, from Hugging Face as a platform to the explosion of open LLMs that are now competitive with closed-source models from OpenAI and Google. The audience was a mix of AI enthusiasts and people just trying to figure out what all the fuss is about.

If I had to pick one session that genuinely changed how I think about security, it's this one. Sandro Manzo and Niels Desloover from the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium covered Cyber Threat Intelligence from the ground up: the difference between strategic, tactical, and operational intel, how threat actors select targets, and how organizations can prepare for modern cyber threats. They shared practical examples from their work at Belgium's national cyber security center, which made the whole thing feel real rather than academic.