DeveloperWeek

DeveloperWeek 2026 was one of those events that reminds you why you love being in tech. San Jose was buzzing. 250+ speakers. 2000+ companies. 100+ sponsors. People from 115+ countries. All in one space, exchanging ideas about where software and AI are headed next. Two talks really stuck with me: 🚀 Du'An Lightfoot (Amazon Web Services (AWS)) - Building Production-Ready AI Agents: This wasn’t about flashy demos. It focused on architecture, scalability, and the tough engineering decisions required to move AI agents from idea to reliable production systems. 💳 Steve Kaliski (Stripe) - Safe Payments for the Autonomous Economy: A deep dive into how AI agents can securely execute real financial transactions. Strong guardrails, proper authentication, and credential protection - the backbone of any autonomous economy. Beyond the sessions, the real highlight was the people. Over three packed days, the conference was full of meaningful conversations and unexpected connections. I had the chance to meet founders, CEOs, investors, and some incredibly sharp engineers. I ran into Vince Kohli,An Empathy Scholar/Impact Tech Investor/XAI, who helped us refine and pitch PanicPal, and he went above and beyond by connecting us with others and helping us gather real, honest feedback. Conversations like those are priceless. I also loved meeting amazing folks from Red Hat, ElevenLabs, Twilio, IBM, Figma, Replit, Browserbase, Datadog, and many more. Every booth had something exciting happening. And yes, Twilio turned me and Kushal K. into an AI animated version of ourselves, which might have been the most fun part of the expo floor. Grateful for the energy, the ideas, and the inspiration. If this is where AI and software are headed, the future is going to be wild in the best way. #DeveloperWeek2026 #AI #SoftwareDevelopment #Startups #Founders #Networking

📸 Two awesome days in San José at DeveloperWeek 2026. Alexis (Lex) Zavala, Michael Roguly, Joe Cillis, and Arpad Kun connected with devs who care deeply about building better mobile apps - and shipping them faster. The team demoed how Bitrise CI and Bitrise Insights help teams optimize build performance, cut pipeline friction, and reclaim hours lost to flaky builds and slow feedback loops. The booth had strong traffic. The demos sparked great discussions. And yes, the “Ship happens” caps 🧢 and afternoon taquitos 🌮 were quite a hit. Already one of the 400,000+ devs building on Bitrise? We'd love to hear what you're working on. Not yet? Start here → 🔗 https://bit.ly/4tZxCAo #Bitrise #MobileDev #CICD #DeveloperWeek

You can make so much impact if you can build things. I gave a talk on context architecture with LLMs at DeveloperWeek in the Bay Area. It's incredible it was standing room only with 45 minutes of Q&A afterwards. It was so rewarding to see the topic land so well with the audience. Context engineering is having its moment. But what I'm seeing - and what clearly resonated in that room - is that context architecture is becoming one of the most critical skills for builders in 2026. It's not just about what goes into the context window. It's about shaping the entire ecosystem around it. Building planning and validation frameworks. Structuring the environment so you can verify the continuous correctness of AI output - including in production, where it actually matters. That's the conversation people wanted to have. And we had it, for a long time after the session ended. Invite me to keynote your conferences, I'll liven them up ❤️🔥 I got to share how Akamai is innovating in AI inference and serverless zero-latency functions - becoming the cloud for developers who just want to build. The energy around this was real, and those conversations meant a lot. Ruckus Voxi, Mario Portillo, Antonio Amador, Zack Kazdoy Then came the Developer Week hackathon. I served as a judge and was genuinely mind-blown. A vocal tutor coach. Autonomous infrastructure agents. An AI agent that finds cars, calls dealers, and books test drives. An agent that turns alerts into root cause analysis, citations, and remediation scripts, and so many other projects. All powered by open source and GPUs running on Akamai Cloud. This is what happens when you give builders the tools and get out of the way. But the best part was the people. Running into Dexter Horthy, the Context OG (who also pointed out I'm slowest latte drinker ever). The one and only Corey Quinn. The most sparklingly amazing Lisa N. Cao. The ultimate AGI mastermind Volodymyr Kyrylov. Philosophical discussions with Mat Velloso. Mihai (MM) Maruseac, Du'An Lightfoot, Ricardo Ferreira, Valerii Moisieienko, Veronika Yurchuk, Julia Furst Morgado, Daniel Oh, Elizabeth Fuentes Leone, Laura Salinas and so many more. Every single one of these people is building something that matters. Someone is going to dream big and define what comes next. Why not you? P.S. I also danced the macarena with a full size robot. Comment if you want to see the video. 🤖