Our CEO and co-founder Dženan Dževlan sat on a panel at this year’s FIT Coding Challenge, held at the Faculty of Information Technologies of the University “Džemal Bijedić” in Mostar. Our company, allOps, was a golden sponsor to the event.

The panel question was the one every student in the room is quietly asking: certificate, diploma, or portfolio, what actually interests companies?

We think the honest answer disappoints people, and that it is worth saying anyway.

Why is the FIT Coding Challenge important

The FIT Coding Challenge has run since 2008, when it began as a way to push students into applying what they had learned to real programming problems.

It opened to high school students and university students across the country in 2012, and has since grown into a regional platform. This year’s edition was the nineteenth, held over two days at the faculty in Mostar, with competition categories covering algorithmic challenges, game development, cybersecurity, innovation and smart solutions, and a new category built around AI agents.

Alongside the competition runs a two-day job fair and a programme of panel discussions, which is where this one sat. The audience is several hundred students and secondary school pupils, most of them making decisions about what to study, what to specialise in, and whether any of it will still be relevant by the time they graduate.

The faculty itself was founded in 1997 as a two-year informatics programme and re-registered as a faculty in 2003. Our CEO Dženan also studied there, so it’s definitely always a trip down the memory lane.

The panel question that made the room uncomfortable

Not the certificate. Not the diploma. Not the portfolio.

This is an unusual position for us to hold in public, because we have spent years helping people get certified. Through AWS community activities, the allOps internship programme and AAI training, we have helped more than 1,000 people earn AWS certifications, in the Balkans and well beyond it.

Anyone who has had a longer conversation with Dženan knows that AWS certification will come up in it eventually.

The argument is not that certifications do not matter. It is that they are the wrong thing to aim at.

“The key is to build discipline to push forward and give everything you have to become the best at what you do. Be proud of your work, go the extra mile when no one is asking you, and do your best even when no one is watching.

Do it often enough that it becomes part of your personality. Certification, diplomas and everything else should be a consequence, not a goal.”

Dženan Dževlan, CEO and co-founder, allOps

From a hiring perspective this is not sentiment. A certificate tells us someone passed an exam on a given day. A diploma tells us someone completed a programme. A portfolio tells us what someone has built, which is closer, but is still a snapshot.

What none of them shows directly is the thing we are actually trying to detect in an interview: whether this person will still be getting better in three years, without anyone standing over them.

That quality produces certificates, diplomas and portfolios as a side effect. The reverse does not hold. We have met plenty of certified engineers who stopped learning the day the exam ended.

Why we keep going back to this faculty

Partly because it is home. Our headquarters is in Mostar, and many team members came through FIT.

Partly because of the people teaching there. Dženan still remembers Professor Denis Mušić attending the MVP Summit in Redmond and how he explained to them what this meant.

It meant was that someone from Mostar was in the room where the decisions were being discussed, and that this was possible from here.

That matters more than it sounds. The default assumption for a talented student in Bosnia and Herzegovina is still that the interesting work happens elsewhere and that the move is inevitable. Every counterexample chips away at it.

We would rather be one of those counterexamples than complain about the talent drain, which is also why we help organise AWS Community Day Adria and why the internship programme exists.

What we pointed students toward

For anyone who missed the panel, you should spend the next 75 minutes on Werner Vogels’ final re:Invent keynote from December 2025.

After fourteen years of keynotes, he spent his last one on what he called the Renaissance Developer, built around curiosity, systems thinking and communication rather than any specific technology.

He also answered the question sitting under every student’s anxiety right now. Asked whether AI will make developers obsolete, his answer was no, with a condition attached: if you evolve.

Some tasks will be automated, some skills will become obsolete, and the developers who adapt will be fine. That has been true of every tool change in the history of the field, from compilers onward.

It is the same argument we made on the panel. With local flair attached, of course.

Thank you and see you again

The internship continues. The training continues. If you are a student at FIT or anywhere else in the region and you want to know what a real production AWS environment looks like rather than an exam question about one, talk to us.

Thanks to the faculty and to the student association behind FITCC for the invitation, and for keeping this running for nineteen years.