Session

The API Refactoring Playbook: Modernizing Legacy Interfaces Without Breaking Everything

Many enterprises have legacy APIs that cannot be rewritten but desperately need to evolve. This talk delivers a practical, battle‑tested playbook for safely and incrementally modernizing APIs. We’ll outline strangler patterns, compatibility testing, contract‑driven refactoring, effective deprecation strategies, and the safe introduction of new capabilities. This session is for teams seeking a balanced approach between full rewrites and inaction.

Session

Backlog at Lightspeed

Requirements work is often the slowest part of the delivery process, even for high‑performing teams. This session introduces a practical, field‑tested playbook that uses a coordinated team of specialized AI agents to accelerate the workflows of Product Owners and Business Analysts. Through a structured multi‑phase approach, these agents support stakeholder discovery, user research, process modeling, risk analysis, feature decomposition, and backlog refinement—while humans remain fully responsible for decisions, quality, and alignment. The result is a complete, traceable, architecture‑ready backlog produced in a fraction of the time. Attendees will learn how to bring AI upstream responsibly, reduce rework, and give teams the clarity they need to start strong.

Session

Event Contracts Are Forever: Designing Schemas That Survive Change

Event‑driven systems promise loose coupling, but in practice, teams freeze event schemas out of fear. Once an event is published, it becomes a long‑lived public contract with unknown consumers, delayed failure modes, and no safe rollback. Versioning that works for REST APIs often collapses under fan‑out, shared streams, and organizational reality.

Session

Event‑Driven Architecture Without the Fairy Dust

Event‑driven architecture is often sold as a simple upgrade: publish an event, add a broker, and enjoy loose coupling. In practice, that advice creates systems that are harder to reason about, harder to change, and far more fragile than the synchronous designs they replaced.

Session

Idempotency, Exactly‑Once, and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves

Distributed systems don’t behave the way the docs say they do. We’re told we have “exactly‑once delivery,” “guaranteed processing,” and “idempotent handlers,” but the moment a region fails over, a consumer crashes mid‑write, or an operator hits “retry,” those guarantees evaporate. This session cuts through the marketing and shows what really happens inside queues, event buses, and serverless runtimes when the world gets messy.

Session

No More Hand-Rolled Terraform

Most cloud architectures follow familiar patterns, yet engineers still rebuild Terraform by hand. This session shows how to turn documented architecture into a machine‑readable contract, use opinionated modules as guardrails, and let AI handle the repetitive translation work without losing human judgment. Through a live, end‑to‑end demo, you’ll see what AI gets right, where it’s intentionally constrained, and how engineers review and refine the output. Attendees leave with a practical model for encoding decisions, a repeatable module strategy, and a workflow that frees teams from low‑value assembly while strengthening standards and governance.

Session

Observability for Asynchronous Systems: Tracing Intent Across Time

Asynchronous, event‑driven systems break the mental model that most observability tools and most teams still rely on. When work unfolds across queues, retries, timers, and long‑running workflows, there is no “request” to trace. The real unit of work is intent, and without explicitly designing for it, failures become opaque, investigations stall, and teams lose the ability to explain what actually happened.

Session

Platform Engineering Without the Fantasy

Platform engineering has become the industry’s latest cure‑all, but behind the glossy diagrams and “golden paths,” many teams are quietly wrestling with platforms that are overbuilt, under‑adopted, and impossible to evolve. The problem isn’t tooling. It’s the fantasy that a platform can succeed without clear contracts, intentional boundaries, and metrics that reflect real value instead of vanity velocity.

Archived Presentations

These presentations are no longer actively offered.

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