2026 Sessions

Building interactive systems with conventional coding means trying to anticipate every possible user action and writing the right response. This quickly becomes nigh impossible. You end up lost in a maze of recursion, fragility, and nested if statements. The more interactive you make your system, the more complex your code gets, until deb...

Everyone talks about how AI can make developers and testers more productive. Fewer people talk about what happens when AI is wrong. Over the last year, I started using AI for everything from generating API tests and automation code to debugging failures, reviewing requirements, and even helping me bake cookies. Sometimes it saved hours...

Many of the most well-known algorithms in computer science history aren't just clever solutions to specific problems. They're crystallized wisdom about how to think systematically about complex challenges and help encode mental models you can apply today and in the future. This talk digs deep (get it?) to excavate (get it?) the problem...

We see IoT everywhere, from smart fridges to air quality sensors, but what about applying observability to billions and billions of living things? Introducing Meowpy, my virtual cat with a full observability stack. In this talk, I will build a digital pet from scratch in Python, instrument it with OpenTelemetry to track his favorite nappi...

It started as a joke: a fictitious curl command using the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP - RFC 2324) to trigger a coffee machine cleaning cycle. Then I built it. And it works. In this talk, we’ll walk through how I instrumented a Breville Barista Express with an ESP32 to safely emulate button inputs, expose a play...

AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot are impressive at generating code. But ask one to "create a Jira story under the Platform epic with BDD acceptance criteria following our team's format" and it falls apart — because it doesn't know your org. Over the past year, I've built and maintained a skills library — a structured collection...

Developers are feeling the friction. AI can help us write code faster, but many team workflows still haven’t caught up. Some teams are still copying and pasting. Some are still jumping between tools. And even with better agents and coding assistants, speed can still show up as messy PRs and code that doesn’t quite fit the system. I wan...

Modern software delivery operates under constant uncertainty. Requirements change. Priorities shift. Production issues emerge unexpectedly. Stakeholders want answers before the full picture is visible. And technical leaders are often expected to make important decisions long before perfect information exists. For many experience...

AI is here, but deciding what to use and how is difficult. In this fast-paced session, we'll explore key decisions for coding effectively in AI including IDEs, models, harnesses, instructions, permissions, agents, and more. You'll leave this session with a variety of ideas for how to rethink your AI-related tooling, patterns, and workflow...

Distributed systems are the backbone of modern software, but their complexity demands thoughtful design. This talk explores essential design patterns to address common challenges in distributed architectures, such as scalability, fault tolerance, and service communication. We’ll explore patterns like CQRS, Saga, API Gateways, and Service ...

Most data pipelines don’t fail on day one. They fail months later — when requirements change, data volume grows, or the original developer is no longer around. Much like martial arts training, pipelines built on shaky fundamentals tend to collapse under pressure. This session focuses on practical data pipeline design patterns that emph...

The talk in the news is all doom and gloom with a healthy dose of anxiety thrown in for good measure. Layoffs, AI's impending self-awareness, job loss from AI. The future of technology employment is certainly unclear now and it's going to be tough for a while, but Jevons Paradox, the calculator, and the computer itself proves that the...

Great engineers don’t just build, they connect and keep connecting. The fastest way to better ideas, sharper execution, and more interesting work isn’t isolation, it’s exposure. Show up. Be curious. Talk about everything you are seeing, even when it is messy. Every conversation compounds: new tools, better patterns, unexpected collabor...

For 40 years we knew how to write software correctly. We just couldn't afford to. Now we can.. We all know you can vibe out some slop on a grammatically incorrect, partial coherent, stream of consciousness. The question is: how do we use AI to develop code at a higher quality level? How do we utilize Ai to write code better than we coul...

Most cloud services follow the same architectural patterns, yet engineers still hand‑assemble Terraform code for each of them. In this session, based on real work done in production, you’ll see how documented architecture can become a machine‑readable contract, how opinionated modules act as guardrails, and how AI can handle the repetitiv...

As AI agent systems move from POC to production, observability becomes both more critical and more complex. Unlike traditional distributed services, AI agents reason probabilistically, invoke tools dynamically, collaborate with other agents, and evolve behavior based on context and memory. This creates new observability challenges: non-de...

Many IT professionals want to advance—but get stuck waiting for the “right opportunity,” promotion, or title. The reality is that in some cases career progression doesn’t start with a role change—it starts with a shift in how you think about your work, your time, and your impact. Drawing on concepts from The Leadership Pipeline this se...

Velocity is useful, but it is not leadership. Most organizations either stop at team velocity and “gut feel,” or they overcorrect into individual scoreboards that erode trust and create perverse incentives. This talk shares a pragmatic middle path: how engineering leaders can use metrics to understand delivery health, code quality, and co...

Modern society is drowning in information scattered across meetings, documents, conversations, and random thoughts. With the advent of generative AI, this problem has gotten exponentially worse. This talk shows how I built a comprehensive digital brain that captures everything—meeting transcripts, voice memos, PDFs, links, conversatio...

The AI space moves faster than anyone can track. A model you evaluated three months ago is obsolete, a best practice you wrote down last quarter is already wrong, and there’s a new tool every week claiming to change everything. This talk is an honest, practical take on staying current without burning out — from someone whose actual job is...

Impostor Syndrome almost killed my tech career. I've discovered a lot about what triggers me and the fallout from letting it take over your working life. I'll tell you my story, and the lessons I learned in order to overcome it. Think you aren't good enough? Let's talk about it.

Modern apps use language models, but how do those models safely interoperate with your company’s backend data without putting the business at risk? SQL MCP Server answers that question. It is Microsoft’s open source MCP server for secure access to SQL Server, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, and MySQL, running in the cloud or on premises...

Let's talk user experience. Windows 11? Inconsistent. Liquid Glass? Difficult. Flat web design? Bland. Desktop apps? Slow. In an age of advanced computing power, high-end displays, and sophisticated design systems, why does software feel increasingly frustrating to use? While we rush to optimize software and websites for visual trends, en...

"Other duties as assigned" is a phrase included in just about everyone's job description and generally means the tasks that the hiring manager or human resources could not think of when writing the job description. As a result, employees often do not even get assigned such tasks or hardly notice when performing them. But what if we sought...

Arr matey! The downstream servers are firing errors like cannonballs—500s everywhere. The database is sinking, and the API gateway seems lost in a fog of timeouts. We attempted to engineer an application for calm seas and instead find ourselves in a maelstrom. Instead, what if we engineered the chaos ourselves and could predict failures? ...

I keep forgetting to water my plants. In this talk, I'll walk through building a practical garden watering assistant in Python. A small app that knows your plants, checks the forecast, and tells you whether to grab the hose. No cloud subscriptions, no smart home hardware, just Python doing something genuinely useful. We'll cover: -...

The anxiety is real. Each new round of announced layoffs only raises the temperature, and the question on a lot of minds is the same: Am I next? Is my skill set becoming obsolete? Beneath that anxiety sits a deeper question. How do we become more valuable with AI at our disposal? This talk isn’t about going against the grain. It’s a...

Spec-driven development flips the traditional workflow on its head: instead of code being the source of truth, the specification becomes the backbone of design, collaboration, and delivery. In this session, we’ll explore how GitHub Spec-Kit enables teams to treat specifications as first-class artifacts—living documents that drive architec...

tech hiring isn't dead, it just demands more of you. taylor desseyn, vp of global community at torc and a 15-year recruiting vet, cuts through the doom headlines with real numbers and a practical playbook: use ai to supercharge your job search, build in public, get into the right communities, and stand out while most people watch from the...

The past twelve months have seen an explosion of compromised high-profile npm packages, and with the release of Claude Mythos it will only get worse from here. Here I'll give you the rules for surviving the apocalypse without getting eaten by the supply-chain zombies.

From the SolarWinds breach to ransomware shutdowns of hospitals and automotive giants, software supply chain attacks are causing billions in damages and threatening national security. Meanwhile, the software we depend on is increasingly assembled from third-party and open-source components that organizations often can't even inventory, mu...

The Krebs Cycle turns glucose into ATP. CI/CD turns code into deployments. Both are energy-intensive, feedback-driven, and fail without oxygen (or tests). Let’s compare cellular respiration to DevOps pipelines! The tools we need to create better CI/CD pipelines are already within us - literally! By breaking down the building blocks to ...

In the world of software, we are asked to do amazing things like connect people across the world and create the tools necessary for major scientific breakthroughs. Unfortunately, we are also asked to do things that are less ethical, such as training AI systems on unlicensed data or ignoring security issues that can lead to massive data br...

I was constantly building personal applications in my Ruby on Rails days. I once built an application in 20 minutes and used it for years. That stopped when I switched to decoupled and distributed systems. The cost and complexity were too high to justify compared to the low cost of apps that were *good enough*. That’s not the case a...

Theme parks solved user experience long before apps existed. They mastered onboarding before SaaS, wayfinding before mobile UX, gamification before Silicon Valley, and emotional retention before analytics dashboards became standard. Every queue, sign, sound, transition, and interaction inside a theme park is intentionally designed t...

Writing automated tests is just the beginning. If your tests run in a browser or mobile VM, they're going to fail sometimes. This is a problem for developers' workflows -- how can you tell if the tests are useful? What happens when you can't merge and it's not your fault? My team has taken many stabs at the problem over the years. In s...