Innovation Starts with HDC 2025 Speakers

RentVision/TanStack

Day 1 - 10:15 AM

Protect Your Infrastructure by Setting the Pace

Ever faced a surprise five or six-figure cloud bill or watched a UI grind to a halt under rapid input? These issues often arise because we forget to put limits on potentially costly operations until performance degrades, resources have been exhausted, or your company runs out of money. It's time to shift away from fixing these issues after the damage is done, and instead make embedding proper safety controls a default practice.

Confluent

Day 1 - 11:15 AM

Explore how Confluent is reinventing Kafka for the data streaming era

Businesses planning to thrive in today’s digital-first world need a modern platform for data in motion. Apache Kafka® has become the industry standard for this infrastructure, leveraged by over 70% of the Fortune 500. With Kafka at its core, Confluent offers a more complete, cloud-native platform to set your data in motion, available everywhere your data and applications reside.

Fivetran

Day 1 - 1:30 PM

Scrumban: The Agile Avenger

This presentation delves into the application of Scrumban methodology to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of security teams. By seamlessly blending the principles of Scrum and Kanban, Scrumban offers a flexible and adaptable approach to managing security projects. Through the following key concepts of Scrumban, security will be able to better handle their daily challenges.

• Prioritize security tasks: Effectively manage a backlog of security initiatives using Scrumban's visual tools and techniques.

• Improve collaboration: Foster better communication and teamwork among security engineers through Scrumban's emphasis on collaboration and transparency.

• Increase responsiveness: Deliver security solutions faster and more efficiently by leveraging Scrumban's iterative and incremental approach..

Confluent

Day 2 - 9:15 AM

Ensuring Quality Streaming Data on Apache Kafka with Confluent Schema Registry

Apache Kafka is the de facto standard technology for data streaming, whether for event-driven application architectures, or providing real-time analytics. Its true power comes from the complete decoupling of data producers & consumers.

However, this means that producers & consumers need to understand & agree upon what the data in Kafka should look like. Confluent's Schema Registry helps us solve this problem by giving us a way to define data contracts for producers to validate the structure of new records, and for consumers to understand what structure to expect.

Learn about how schemas work, how to handle schema evolution, and see some code examples of how to work with the Schema Registry from your application. We'll conclude with a look at how Confluent Cloud's Stream Governance builds upon the Schema Registry for the industry's only complete, fully-managed governance suite for streaming data

ZeroDown Software

Day 2 - 10:15 AM

Zero Down Time for Web Applications

What if you could prevent down time for your Applications during a cyber incident, weather catastrophe, or cloud provider outage?

Mutual of Omaha

Day 2 - 1:30 PM

OSS ticking time SBOM

Open-Source Software is used in all development environments, is your OSS being used correctly or are you setting your code up to be exploited and compromised with the next CVE?

Trility

Day 1 - 10:15 AM

The Last Mile of DevOps: Solving the Secrets Challenge in a Cloud-Native World

Containerization solved the "it worked on my machine" problem, but a new bottleneck has emerged that's just as disruptive: secrets management. When deployments fail, the culprit is often a missing, expired, or misconfigured secret. This session tackles that "last mile" challenge head-on, providing a practical playbook for managing secrets across the entire development lifecycle so your applications deploy reliably and securely, every time.

Jay Brummels, Principal DevSecOps Consultant at Trility, will move beyond theory and into practical application, demonstrating a comprehensive approach to handling secrets before you even write a line of code. You'll see how to establish a secure and automated process that works for your code without giving developers unnecessary access to production credentials.

Using Azure and GitHub, Brummels will unpack a structured framework for secrets management, with principles applicable to any cloud environment.

This session is for any developer or tech lead who wants to stop troubleshooting failed deployments caused by secrets and start building more resilient, secure, and automated systems.

Source Allies

Day 1 - 11:15 AM

DevOps at Scale: Achieving a Zero-Downtime Migration for 80 Million Daily Requests

How do you pull off a seamless data platform migration in a mission-critical environment—without taking your systems offline? In this talk, we’ll delve into how our team leveraged DevOps and agile principles to execute a zero-downtime migration from AWS OpenSearch to Elastic.co’s Elasticsearch, handling over 80 million daily requests.

Attendees will learn how we used parallel ingestion pipelines, weighted routing for gradual traffic cutovers, and massive data synchronization to ensure a smooth transition. We’ll highlight the observability and feedback loops that guided our decision-making, along with the iterative practices that allowed us to pivot quickly and maintain confidence throughout the migration. You’ll walk away with practical insights on designing resilient architectures, mitigating risk, and applying DevOps best practices to tackle large-scale migrations—without leaving your users in the dark.

MajorGuidanceSolutions

Day 1 - 1:30 PM

Enhancing Application Security and Resiliency on Azure: Networking and Deployment Strategies

While deploying applications on Azure's public backbone is straightforward, it often leaves the applications vulnerable to various attack vectors. Additionally, recent changes to Azure App Service mean that built-in regional failover is no longer provided.

This session aims to deepen your understanding of Azure's networking and security services to help you build private, secure, resilient applications.

During the session, we will explore fundamental architectures like hub-and-spoke models and the use of primary and secondary regions for high availability.

Fiserv

Day 2 - 9:15 AM

From Reactive to Resilient: Empowering Kubernetes with Agentic AI for Autonomous Self-Healing

Kubernetes has redefined how we deploy and manage applications, but its default self-healing and scaling behaviors are fundamentally reactive—limited to restarting containers or scaling pods based on static thresholds. In this talk, we present a new operational paradigm: using agentic AI to create Kubernetes environments that are intelligent, proactive, and self-improving.

We’ll explore how large language model (LLM)-powered agents can continuously observe telemetry (metrics, logs, events), reason about system health, and autonomously plan and execute remediation workflows. These agents go beyond automation scripts by learning from outcomes, optimizing decisions over time, and adapting to new contexts.

Attendees will gain:

A practical architecture built on open-source tools like Prometheus, kagent, autogen, KEDA, LangChain, and Kubernetes-native APIs, Helm, slack or msteams and a Custom wrapper to provides a blueprint for building self-healing, cost-efficient Kubernetes platforms.

Octopus Deploy

Day 2 - 10:15 AM

Canary Deployments are a myth - true progressive delivery occurs via OpenFeature

Based on two decades of deploying and rolling back software and seven years of helping customers achieve their CD goals, this session debunks myths about canary deployments. While they are viewed as essential to progressive delivery, they are far from a universal solution.

Canary deployments rarely uncover last-minute issues in strong CI/CD pipelines. They demand significant investment in deployment processes, database compatibility, and rollback strategies—often outweighing the benefits. Most importantly, they lack precision, requiring workarounds for targeting subsets of users.

This session shows that OpenFeature meets progressive delivery goals without overhauling your build and deployment processes. It allows you to separate deploying new versions from releasing functionality. Rollbacks require a simple toggle instead of redirecting to an old version. With segmentation, OpenFeature enables targeted rollouts to specific users or groups, gathering feedback over time.

Archer

Day 2 - 1:30 PM

How to replatform your monolith and live to tell the tale

Most of the code running in the world on any given day could be considered "legacy." Patterns change. Frameworks change. Technology shifts. Yesterday's shiny toy becomes today's technical debt. But the reality is that a vast amount of useful business logic has already been created in these systems, and no one wants to reinvent the wheel. And the good news is you don't have to. With a well-thought-out plan, it is possible to shift an older application forward multiple generations of architecture, to become as modern and scalable as a brand-new product.

This talk will be a case study of one such replatforming project. Moving a .NET Framework and Windows SaaS product into the world of modern .NET, Linux runners, containers, and serverless. We'll talk through the architectural plan, the technology transformation, and the equally critical team dynamics to make the journey not only achievable for the engineers, but an uplifting and rewarding experience.

LUNAVI

Day 1 - 10:15 AM

Context Engineering: The Key to Smarter AI Apps and Agents

As Generative AI evolves beyond simple one-shot Q&A, it demands much more than just good prompts. When AI workflows involve dozens or even hundreds of LLM calls, success hinges on how well context is engineered, maintained, and shared throughout the process. This introduces a new and critical discipline: Context Engineering.

In this session, you’ll learn why Context Engineering is arguably more important than prompt design or the model itself. We’ll explore how to construct and persist meaningful context across agent workflows, leverage tools like memory, state, and retrieval (RAG), and detect when context enters a degraded or invalid state. Real-world lessons and practical guidance will help you build smarter, more resilient AI applications and agents.

LUNAVI

Day 1 - 11:15 AM

Lessons Learned in Building AI Knowledge Assistants: Practical Insights from Real-World Development

As AI agents evolve from isolated chatbots into dynamic, networked collaborators, the foundation for scalable orchestration lies in emerging communication protocols. This session explores the architecture of modern multi-agent systems, focusing on the pivotal role of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) interaction.

Exploring how MCP standardizes context exchange reveals how agents can retrieve data, invoke functions, and access APIs through a consistent and extensible interface. We'll examine real-time agent-to-agent communication strategies - how agents share goals, delegate tasks, maintain state, pass memory references, and integrate retrieved knowledge to complete complex workflows. By establishing a shared language and execution framework, these protocols transform AI agents from isolated tools into coordinated systems capable of dynamic, intelligent collaboration at scale.

Inscribe Technologies

Day 1 - 1:30 PM

Securing Data in an AI World

AI is one of the most important technological innovations in human history. However, AI presents incredible challenges for data security, including the critical vulnerability posed by the extensive use of user data by AI companies to enhance their machine learning models. As we build to towards an AI world, we must also consider how we secure our data. If we do not, the current concept of intellectual property as a whole is at risk.

AlphaWall LLC

Day 2 - 9:15 AM

Your Own Private AI Coding Buddy

This talk will be an introduction to using Private AI to create your own personal private coding assistant. We will start by creating a plugin for VS Code that we will hook up to show off a few private AI models currently available. After that, we'll also show more advanced plugins that can do things such as smart completion and code reviews. Showing the users how to be able to get functionality similar to what commercial tools are offering without having to send data back to their servers. This talk will compare/contrast what you can do with private and public AI systems. Hopefully, attendees will leave the talk with the tools/knowledge they need to create/use their own private AI coding assistants.

LUNAVI

Day 2 - 10:15 AM

Lessons Learned in Building AI Knowledge Assistants: Practical Insights from Real-World Development

As organizations race to harness the potential of AI, knowledge assistants have emerged as powerful tools for surfacing insights, automating research, and enhancing decision-making. But building effective AI assistants isn't just about plugging into an LLM, it's about deeply understanding how AI systems interact with context, content, and human workflows.

This talk shares hard-won lessons from designing and deploying multiple AI knowledge assistants across varied domains. From aligning assistant capabilities with real user needs, to navigating the challenges of integrating enterprise knowledge sources, to refining prompt engineering and memory strategies - each iteration revealed critical design patterns, failure points, and breakthroughs.

Attendees will come away with practical guidance on what works, what doesn't, common failure points, and how to approach the evolving landscape of AI assistant development with both ambition and realism.

Mutual of Omaha

Day 2 - 1:30 PM

The Full-Stack ML Practitioner: From Notebook to Production, and What It Means for Modern AI

Getting a model out of a Jupyter notebook and into production is where most machine learning projects break down. It's a task that demands a "full-stack" perspective, one that connects data science with software engineering and architecture. For the past five years, I've lived on that bridge, working end-to-end to build and deploy ML systems: from initial design and robust testing to creating frameworks that empower data scientists.

In this talk, I'll share the hard-won lessons from that frontline experience. We will move beyond algorithms to focus on the engineering discipline required for success, like designing systems that anticipate failure, implementing testing strategies that catch more than just code bugs, and building guardrails that create trustworthy results.

Finally, we'll connect these production lessons to the bigger picture and explore what they mean for modern AI. I'll offer my perspective on how these foundational principles are essential for tackling the next wave of challenges, including the unpredictable world of generative models. This session is for any practitioner who wants to build AI systems that work, last, and are ready for what comes next.

Dojo and Co

Day 1 - 10:15 AM

Modernizing Legacy Code - While Not Bringing Down Prod

Imagine you have some legacy code. It may be on an outdated tech stack, or perhaps you are looking to go to the cloud, or perhaps it just isn't properly aligned with the product anymore. How do you actually go through and modernize the application when multiple teams are involved...and not bring down production?

In this session, you will learn real-world techniques to help you with modernization. Including
Realigning product, architecture, and teams with Strategic DDD
Finding seams in your existing product
Questioning product assumptions
Making boring changes to get quick learning
Natural code expansion and contraction

As well as how to decide if you are better off modernizing than migrating.

Fleet Device Management

Day 1 - 11:15 AM

Why Great Developers Draw: 4 Architecture Diagrams That Clarify Everything

The best developers don't just write code; they also draw. Whether you're building features, debugging systems, or explaining ideas to teammates, great architecture diagrams can make the difference between confusion and clarity.

In this talk, we'll explore four essential diagram types that every software engineer should have in their toolkit: sequence diagrams, flowcharts, class diagrams, and ER diagrams. You'll learn what each one is for, when to use it, and how to avoid common pitfalls. We'll look at real-world examples that show how an effective diagram can reveal bugs, unblock teammates, and make complex systems easily understandable.

These diagrams aren't just for architects. They're for anyone who wants to write better code by thinking visually. Whether you're diagramming by hand or using tools like Mermaid, this talk will show you how to communicate your ideas with power and precision.

CSG International

Day 1 - 1:30 PM

Got IT Risk, Organization, & Business Context Data?

- Have you ever noticed that one can have tons of IT data and still struggle with making strategic decisions?
- When faced with security or operational incidents, do you struggle to quickly acquire risk, organizational, & business context information?
- Is your IT data in silos, and data anomalies are born without anyone even knowing?

Regardless of if you new to enterprise IT or you are a seasoned veteran, this session has something for everyone. It does not matter if you are attempting to secure and operate private, public, or hybrid cloud environments, or how many mergers and acquisitions make up your company. Come and explore the methods used by a billion-dollar tech company to transform its IT data visibility into a self-sustainable competitive advantage.

As we scrutinize the directives of IT professionals, hear how to advance technology, process, and real behavioral change within stakeholders. Look and discover for yourself which components accelerate the greatest impacts.

Charles Schwab

Day 2 - 9:15 AM

Develop Generative AI solutions using Azure OpenAI and the Semantic Kernel SDK

Ready to build your own AI-powered applications? This session shows you how to leverage Azure OpenAI and the new Semantic Kernel SDK. You'll learn to architect, develop, and deploy your own generative AI solutions, including how to build a kernel, integrate plugins, and apply filters to control function behavior. With live demos and practical examples, you'll walk away with the skills to start creating smarter applications today.

Strategic Technology Consulting (STC)

Day 2 - 10:15 AM

From Chaos to Clarity: Breaking Down MBSE Development One Piece at a Time

Let’s face it, MBSE sounds amazing in theory, but in practice, it can feel like assembling IKEA furniture without instructions (and missing half the screws). Having a solid starting point is crucial, but so is breaking the effort into manageable tasks. This session will show how to use Atlassian JIRA to create a practical work breakdown structure for MBSE development.

We will explore a thought-provoking issue workflow, clever automations, and reusable templates to streamline standard work. Additionally, we will discuss how Dassault Cameo Systems Modeler (CSM) can integrate with JIRA to improve visibility and coordination between system modeling and project management.

Whether you are a seasoned pro or just starting out, this session will help you organize efforts and maybe even enjoy the process. Join me to tackle MBSE like a boss, because a well-structured plan, powered by the right tools, is key to success.

Buildertrend

Day 2 - 1:30 PM

Holistic Quality - How Everyone Can Improve Quality Everywhere

When it comes to testing and quality, we've heard about shifting left, shifting right, testing pyramids and ice cream cones, all sorts of tactics with the hopes of improving speed and quality. Many times, these fall short because they're focusing on narrow scopes of quality that might not matter to everyone. When everyone thinks about quality as a whole, from the start to the end of the SDLC, we can make great strides towards improving quality of a product, improving customer satisfaction, reducing the number of bugs, and enabling speed.

In this talk, learn about the holistic quality model, its pros and cons, how to introduce it to your teams, and how the whole team can contribute to quality, using real-life examples.

Topics covered:
- What is holistic quality?
- What does it look like in practice?
- Who can encourage it?
- What are some practical ways to encourage adoption of a holistic quality mindset?

ClickHouse

Day 1 - 10:15 AM

How open source is re-shaping the cloud data warehouse landscape

In the last decade, the rise of the proprietary cloud data warehouse, led by platforms like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift, has helped modernize data warehousing by providing scalability, convenience, and most importantly flexibility and openness to a very important class of data workloads. Once this data was available in the cloud, it was possible to use it for more use cases, including user-facing analytics, dashboarding, observability, machine learning, and so on.

This led to recurrent performance challenges, a degraded user experience, significant runaway costs, and also — vendor lock-in. In this talk, we explore the role open source technologies (e.g. open source real-time analytical databases like ClickHouse) and open data lake standards (e.g. Iceberg, Hudi, Delta Lake) play in transforming the modern data stack and helping organizations move away from a monolithic cloud data warehouse.

BridgeView

Day 1 - 11:15 AM

LLMs Under the Hood – Building with Transformers, RAG, and Guardrails

Large language models are powerful but unpredictable. This session pulls back the curtain on how LLMs actually work, then shows you how to build with them responsibly. We’ll break down the core mechanics: tokenization, embeddings, transformer architecture, and attention. Then we’ll get into practical implementation patterns: prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Along the way, we’ll show where LLMs fail—hallucinations, context limits, security risks—and how to design systems that stay grounded, accurate, and secure. If you’re a developer trying to move beyond demos and build something real with LLMs, this session is for you.

ClickHouse

Day 1 - 1:30 PM

Engineering the Future: Real-Time, Vector-Powered Analytics with ClickHouse

ClickHouse is powering the next wave of real-time analytics and AI-driven applications—and not just as a lightning-fast OLAP engine, but increasingly as a scalable vector database. In this talk, we’ll explore how teams are using ClickHouse to handle massive, high-cardinality datasets and perform fast, cost-efficient vector search across multi-terabyte embedding stores.
We’ll cover real-world use cases from the ClickHouse community, walk through recent feature releases announced at Open House, and share guidance on when a specialized vector database is needed—and when ClickHouse alone is more than enough.

Microsoft

Day 2 - 9:15 AM

The New Age of Development in Azure

In today’s fast-paced development landscape, reducing onboarding friction and accelerating time-to-productivity are critical for engineering teams. This session explores modern tools and best practices within the Azure stack that streamline developer workflows, from onboarding to deployment.

Through a live demo, we’ll showcase an end-to-end developer onboarding experience leveraging Azure DevBox, providing an ephemeral, pre-configured development environment with all necessary tools and repositories, enabling developers to start coding in minutes. Next, we’ll dive into Azure Deployment Environments, which allow seamless provisioning of sandbox infrastructure, ensuring developers can quickly test and iterate without operational bottlenecks. Finally, we’ll explore how GitHub Copilot and the Azure Copilot extension enhance productivity by automating code suggestions, streamlining deployments, and integrating AI-powered assistance into the development lifecycle.

Attendees will leave with actionable insights on leveraging Azure’s latest innovations to optimize developer velocity, reduce setup time, and create a frictionless coding experience.

Revela

Day 2 - 10:15 AM

Mastering Emotional Intelligence: The Competitive Edge No One Talks About

Emotions show up at work whether we like it or not, so why not learn to lead with them? In this fast-paced, research-backed session, we’ll explore how emotional intelligence isn’t just a “nice-to-have,” it’s your next-level leadership advantage. Grounded in neuroscience and real-world behavior patterns, this session helps employees and leaders alike understand what drives their reactions, how to stay in control under pressure, and how to create real connections in moments that matter.

Exact Sciences

Day 2 - 1:30 PM

Building AI-Powered Development Workflows: From GitHub Pull Requests to Notion Documentation with MCP Servers

In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI-powered development tools, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) represents a breakthrough in connecting large language models with external systems. This interactive session will demonstrate how to build and deploy a custom MCP server that creates an automated workflow connecting GitHub pull requests with Notion documentation

Attendees will witness a live demonstration of building an MCP server that:

Fetches GitHub pull request data programmatically

Analyzes code changes using AI assistance

Automatically generates comprehensive review comments

Creates structured documentation in Notion Page

Through hands-on examples, participants will learn the architecture of MCP servers, understand client-server communication patterns, and gain practical experience with GitHub API integration and Notion workspace automation. The demonstration will showcase real code, live API calls, and tangible results that attendees can immediately apply to their own development workflows.

This session is ideal for software developers, DevOps engineers, and technical leads looking to streamline their development processes with AI-powered automation tools.

Fleet Device Management

Day 1 - 10:15 AM

Will AI Coding Agents Replace Software Developers?

AI code completion is yesterday's news. Today's rise of AI coding agents, which are tools that autonomously generate, test, and even refactor code, raises a critical question: Will engineers become mere supervisors of AI systems, or is this just another wave of productivity tooling?

In this talk, we'll walk through the full software development lifecycle (SDLC) and assess where AI coding agents genuinely move the needle and where they fall short. You'll learn how these tools impact design, implementation, testing, and maintenance, based on real-world experience and emerging industry data. We'll explore the hidden risks, productivity ceilings, and skills developers must sharpen to stay relevant.

AI won't take your job, but it might reshape it. This talk will help you understand where human engineers remain irreplaceable and how to stay ahead as the tools evolve.

Mutual of Omaha

Day 1 - 11:15 AM

Optimizing Developer Productivity

High-performance software development requires drawing on a variety of skills, techniques, and character traits like learning agility, disciplined pragmatism, problem-solving, and familiarity with modern tooling. This presentation will focus on some key areas to focus on to improve developer productivity for individual contributors as well as leaders of development teams.

Don't Panic Labs

Day 1 - 1:30 PM

Experimentation as a Tool for Process Improvement

Do you ever find yourself thinking, “I could get so much more done if only ___”?

Maybe there’s a process that feels unnecessarily frustrating, a task that seems to add no real value, or a great idea you’ve had—but you’re not sure how to get it off the ground.

In this session, we’ll explore how applying the language and mindset of experimentation can help overcome resistance to change, offer a clear framework for taking action, and lead to meaningful improvements for both individuals and organizations. Whether you're trying to fix something broken or enhance what already works, small experiments can lead to big results.

Bellevue University/ComPriSec

Day 2 - 9:15 AM

Invent It. Build It. Protect It: IP Strategies for Developers and Innovators

In today’s fast-paced tech world, having a brilliant idea or breakthrough code is only part of the equation—knowing how to protect it is what sets lasting innovators apart. Whether you’re a software developer, engineer, or product creator, this session delivers the critical strategies you need to safeguard your intellectual property (IP) before it’s too late.

Dr. Lisa McKee is a scientist, researcher, innovator, inventor, and entrepreneur—a rare combination that spans academic, technical, legal, and business domains. Her work integrates privacy, security, compliance, and AI into actionable solutions that shape the future of data protection and responsible innovation.

In this session, Dr. McKee shares real-world insights on the practical application of copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets: what they are, when they apply, and how to use them to your advantage. But this isn’t just theory—you’ll hear firsthand lessons from her own journey protecting source code, algorithms, frameworks, and brand assets. Learn what worked, what didn’t, and what she wishes she’d done sooner.

Greysoft Technologies Limited

Day 2 - 10:15 AM

Cross-Continental Code: Scaling Open-Source Projects and Remote Dev Teams Between Africa and the U.S.

Session Overview:
This session explores how African and U.S.-based developers are co-creating scalable, production-ready software by collaborating across time zones, cultures, and infrastructure realities. It will showcase real-world technical case studies of distributed dev teams, open-source projects led by African contributors, and the DevOps workflows that make global collaboration work. More than a conversation about “opportunity,” this is a deep dive into architectures, tools, and team dynamics that power cross-border codebases.

Dojo and Co

Day 2 - 1:30 PM

Systems Thinking Workshop - Visualizing Relationships and Knowing Where to Act

In this hands-on workshop, attendees will learn how to model systems and look for leverage points as means of introducing intentional, impactful change in an organization.

The workshop will cover:

- Systems Diagramming (Nouns, Verbs, Reinforcing, Balancing Loops)

- Types of leverage points and identification

- Value Demand / Failure Demand

- Determining areas of change where 'good enough' is enough

- Separating signal from noise - knowing your changes made a difference

This workshop is designed for anyone that is interested in helping teams and organizations be more effective and worry less about 'the process'

GREYPAPER

Day 1 - 10:15 AM

Beyond coding: AI disruption at speed

Learn how the current generation of AI startups (e.g. Bond, YCX25, Meet Donna: "AI Chief of Staff") are disrupting more than coding tasks, impacting white collar work, and how AI is being used to accelerate the development of AI itself (Example: greypaper's work on meaningful internal representation). How will robotic hailing services and delivery, such as Robotaxi (launched June 22nd, 2025) and Waymo disrupt Uber and the gig economy much the same way Midjourney and OpenAI have disrupted freelance design and copywriting, etc? Why "learning to code" might still be a good idea, even if you don't.

Nelnet

Day 1 - 11:15 AM

C# Past, Present and Future

C# is now over 20 years old, but continues to grow and change. In this presentation, we will:

- Start at the very beginning and explore the roots of the language
- Explore the versions and the important features that were released, and what they meant for the future of the language
- Review the most current release and the way the newest language features allow us to accomplish our goals
- Look to the future and what is next

Attendees will leave with a greater understanding of C#, .NET, where it came from, where it is going, and how to take advantage of the newest language features. This presentation is demo and code-heavy with lots of examples and fun!

Mumbler

Day 1 - 1:30 PM

Ever dreamed of a rewarding software engineering role with a real shot at a hefty payout? This session pulls back the curtain on the exhilarating—and sometimes bewildering—world of startups from the employee's perspective. We’ll ditch the jargon and get real about stock, risk, and the surprising realities of what it takes to turn potential into profit.

Objectives

In this session, we’ll cover:

What makes a company a "startup" and not just a small business.

Demystifying employee stock, vesting schedules, and why your shares are currently worth exactly $0.

Understanding what an "exit" is and how it can turn your stock into cold, hard cash.

The good, the bad, and the sometimes bizarre reality of being a part of a scrappy startup.

You'll leave with a clear understanding of how to evaluate the risks and rewards of working for a startup. We'll skim the surface, have some fun, and hopefully inspire you to find your own opportunity in the chaos.

UNeTech Institute at UNMC

Day 2 - 9:15 AM

From Code to Commercial: NSF I-Corps and the Nerdy Art of Tech Commercialization

You’ve built the algorithm, trained the model, fine-tuned the hardware, and solved the technical challenge no one thought was solvable. But now what?

Welcome to the world of NSF I-Corps — the federal program quietly powering some of the most successful tech startups in the country by teaching brilliant minds how to think like entrepreneurs without selling their souls.

This session is your backstage pass to understanding how scientific and engineering innovations transition from lab to market — with an unapologetically nerdy deep dive into customer discovery, product-market fit, value propositions, and the secret sauce behind I-Corps: the Lean Startup methodology.

You’ll learn:
- Why “build it and they will come” is a lie.
- How to test your tech assumptions without writing a single line of code.
- What deep-tech founders keep getting wrong — and how to avoid their mistakes.
- How to get funding (yes, real money) from the NSF to test your commercial hypotheses.

Through a mix of lightning-fast presentations, real-world startup stories, and interactive challenges, we’ll decode the surprisingly badass world of I-Corps. Whether you’re working in AI, robotics, quantum, cybersecurity, or other bleeding-edge domains, this session will help you map a path from invention to impact.

Marketing Architects

Day 2 - 10:15 AM

Cross-Continental Code: Scaling Open-Source Projects and Remote Dev Teams Between Africa and the U.S.

The HTTP protocol started in 1991 as a way for physicists to share simple text-based documents, and has grown to support the large complicated web applications we all use today. We’ll review the history of HTTP, how it works, and the major features in the currently standardized HTTP/2. We’ll also look to the future with HTTP/3 to see how it might change the way we develop and deploy websites.

FNBO (First National Bank)

Day 2 - 1:30 PM

Suiting Up: How AI Mechs Transform Developers into Code Titans

Gone are the days when developers fought code battles with nothing but their wits and a text editor. Welcome to the age of the AI-augmented developer – where intelligent tools act as your personal mech suit, amplifying every aspect of your development capabilities.

In this session, we'll explore how modern AI tools transform ordinary developers into code titans capable of superhuman feats across the entire software development lifecycle. You'll discover how to "suit up" with AI-powered capabilities that enhance your coding speed, debugging precision, testing thoroughness, and troubleshooting effectiveness.