We talk a lot about technical debt — postponed refactorings, shortcuts to clean up later. But what if some of our hardest problems aren’t caused by code at all? What if our biggest technical debt is social in nature? Unspoken tensions, misaligned conversations, and collaboration rituals that look healthy on the surface can reinforce power imbalances and leave people unseen or unheard. Social debt ...
Real-world AI adoption, smarter ways of working, and lessons from the front linesThe AI revolution isn’t coming — it’s already altering how we architect products, ship features, and run engineering teams.During this talk, in his signature charismatic style, Sander Hoogendoorn, CTO at iBOOD.com and a seasoned developer with over four decades of coding experience, doesn’t get stuck in theory or hype...
Every significant software design choice—whether you’re designing a bounded context, deciding on the system boundary, settling on an architectural style, selecting a complex system integration approach, and even evaluating a block of AI-generated code—has a moment where one path just feels right. But what if that powerful 'gut feeling' is actually a cognitive bias in disguise?The human mind is a p...
When you hear “governance,” you might think of red tape, bureaucracy, or someone telling you what you can’t do. But real governance is about alignment and reducing technical risk. And that matters more than ever.In most cases, engineers aren’t deliberately making risky decisions—they just don’t have clear expectations. That’s where good governance comes in. It ensures everyone understands what “go...
When do you need an architecture? How specific should my contracts be? Should I make everything a microservice? Are my services too small? If you are wondering about these questions, you’re not alone. It turns out these questions all relate to architecture anti-patterns and pitfalls - things we do that get us into trouble. In this lively session, Mark Richards talks about some of the common archit...
How do you reason about which tools to provide your developers? What is the value of finding a class of bugs earlier in the workflow? How late in the software release process is too late to stop the pipeline to fix a defect? How do we reason about the value of faster deployments? This talk will attempt to answer questions like these, using the "Develop, Deploy, Operate" model. This work attempts t...
How do we use objects to model a domain? Whilst Domain Driven Design (DDD) exhorts its practitioners to focus on the domain, it is surprisingly sparse on how we should accomplish that, other than a few patterns whose job is to abstract away concepts that live outside of that domain. What though of the domain model?In Domain Driven Design, Eric Evans is explicit that it relies on usage of Rebecca W...
Most change initiatives in software fail because they optimize for plans, not for behavior. Teams adopt new frameworks, roll out new tools, and attend inspiring training. But when Monday arrives, people do the same thing and the code looks the same.The problem isn’t motivation or understanding. It’s that systems quietly reinforce existing habits. Until those systems change, behavior won’t.In this ...
AI agents can generate code faster than we can understand it. That gap creates verification debt: changes reach production before anyone has validated what they do.In this talk, you will learn the Context Stack, a layered model for how developer intent becomes working software in agentic workflows. You will also learn a shared responsibility line that clarifies what is on the model or platform ver...
My students have come to graduate school with the specific aim, usually, of getting into the tech industry. They don't have the preexisting technical experience that footnotes blog posts about how much the tool has helped professional engineers code. What skills do we focus on in class to help them enter this industry, and what do I think is most critical for them to know as they begin? ...
As AI systems become capable of writing, modifying, and operating software autonomously, we are entering an era where code is abundant and change is continuous. But if software increasingly builds itself, what exactly are we architecting?This talk explores how the rise of autonomous development reshapes what architecture means. Traditional patterns - from microservices to API contracts - were desi...
Building correct distributed systems takes thinking outside the box, and the fastest way to do that is to think inside a different box. One different box is "formal methods", the discipline of mathematically verifying software and systems. Formal methods encourages unusual perspectives on systems, models that are also broadly useful to all software developers. In this talk we will learn how to see...
Have you seen early productivity gains from AI, only to watch them disappear under growing complexity and production incidents? You're not alone. There's a common reason. Many production systems already struggle with technical debt. When AI agents enter the development loop, that debt becomes a multiplier. Poor-quality code not only increases defects and costs. It dramatically raises AI risk by dr...
Building AI-powered customer support in fintech isn’t just about integrating ChatGPT. It requires careful risk management, continuous impact validation, and pragmatic product decisions.In this talk, I’ll share how we built and rolled out automated chat support at Wise for its 15M+ customers over the past year - evolving from simple ML classification to full conversational agents. You’ll learn how ...
Genetic algorithms "learn" to make better decisions by making continuous improvements in strategy based the fitness of that solution for survival. These algorithms, modeled after Darwinian evolution, can solve complex optimization problems across many domains - from resource allocation to network design to automated testing. In this talk we'll define the DNA of our solutions, explore how to repres...
The AI testing landscape is drowning in promises: "autonomous testing," "self-healing tests," "AI-generated coverage." After a year of building production agentic systems and watching teams struggle to move past demos, I've learned what actually works—and what's still vendor theater.This hands-on tutorial cuts through the noise. You'll work with the open-source Agentic QE Fleet and Claude Code, pr...
Autonomous teams are an article of faith in modern software development. Give cross-functional full-stack full-lifecycle teams autonomy and they will deliver value and flow – or better value, sooner, safer, happier.But where are the boundaries of autonomy? Where does governance and policy fit in? Can a team decide their own HR practices, interactions with regulators & funding model? What about arc...
