DeveloperWeek 2025

Gregory Lind, Buildly, CEO and Founder

Redefine team communication with radical transparency. Fostering a culture of openness, honesty, and positivity in your team, can create a work environment where everyone feels empowered to do their best work and grow both personally and professionally. This talk will give an overview to bringing radical transparency into your DevOps, software and product development processes. 

Jessica Deen, GitHub, Staff Developer Advocate

Unlock the full potential of GitHub Actions in this 25-minute demo with Jessica Deen, staff developer advocate at GitHub. Jessica will guide you through advanced features, such as job summaries, matrix jobs, reusable workflows, and OpenID Connect for passwordless cloud deployments. You'll also learn more about artifact attestations and explore starter workflow templates to help streamline your CI/CD processes. You'll see how these powerful tools can enhance your development workflow, boost productivity, and ensure security. 

Jens Wessling, Veracode, Chief Technology Officer

As software development continues to evolve at a rapid pace and new innovations bring a world of possibilities, one item is often left behind: automated regression testing. The truth is without it, organizations can forget about software quality, security, winning customers' trust or being agile.

Regression testing is an integral, non-negotiable part of the production software development process right from the very moment the first line of production code is written. Its impact goes beyond code correctness, influencing development velocity, reducing long-term maintenance costs and ensuring a smoother integration process during acquisitions. However, companies often scramble to retrofit regression testing into their legacy code, but in reality, less than 10% of these after-the-fact efforts ever pan out. It might be tempting to overlook the absence of solid regression testing in smaller companies, but here's the catch: the long-term costs of maintaining code without automated testing don't just stay put – they grow. It's not just a “nice to have” it’s a strategic investment to safeguard their current operations and for companies to position themselves for future growth, innovation and success.

In this Thought Leadership Session, Jens Wessling, CTO of Veracode, outlines the importance of automated regression testing, highlighting why both developers and the C-Suite should make it a priority from the outset and how to make it a core aspect of your team's ethos.

Ben Ryves, GetYourGuide, Staff Site Reliability Engineer
Maggie Slukova, GetYourGuide, Staff Site Reliability Engineer

How difficult is it to minimize the toil of cluster upgrades while increasing confidence in deploying the changes?

Even when managed, cluster upgrades are an unavoidable part of cluster maintenance, yet they can also be a source of toil, stress and outages; either when upgrading Kubernetes itself or additional cluster components. Manually testing changes in staging clusters, deploying with a high sense of uncertainty - these time consuming tasks can be mitigated with tests. Add nifty automation and cluster management efforts are reduced to a bare minimum.

Is investing in cluster tests and automation worth it? Yes! This talk shows how a team of three engineers keeps multiple clusters continuously up-to-date with minimal time investment, effort and disruptions. By leveraging the e2e-framework and Helm, everything from Istio to cluster autoscaler is tested and seamlessly managed.

Roy Maor, Cisco, Algorithm Team Lead

It is evident that using a graph theory-based approach to reduce cyber security risk on the cloud is a need rather than a want. Having a reliable data model and a continuous mapping of your
cloud environment to a graph database yields value in two different aspects. First, visibility – gaining a deep understanding of the environment’s cloud architecture, and second, cloud risk
management – identifying critical attack paths in the environment and mitigating the risk they present. By finding the right connections between graph algorithms to cloud security
misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, gaining brand new visibility on faulty cloud architecture and turning it into high-value context-based risk insights becomes possible.

Animesh Mishra, Diffblue, Senior Solutions Engineer

Developer toil is real — days, even weeks, are spent conducting manual, repetitive, time-gobbling tasks like unit testing. And while GenAI coding assistants can support developers, they repeatedly fall short in performing complex TestQA tasks without human oversight.

The problem is compounded by the shortage of experienced testers, leaving developers drowning in QA testing rather than writing and innovating application code. Reports show 75% of developers’ time is spent on tasks other than code generation, resulting in 57% of developers admitting to skipping unit tests entirely.

For companies to succeed, code must be fool proof. So how can developers ensure testing is comprehensive and done with due diligence — and at scale?

The answer lies in reinforcement learning-based autonomous AI, which can eliminate up to 95% of the time developers typically spend on test writing. In this session, you will learn how to eliminate developer toil by automating manual and tedious test operations at scale (both locally and in CI), how the right tools can autonomously write and maintain unit tests for entire Java code bases, and how to ensure your unit tests for complex code are comprehensive.

This talk is designed for dev leaders looking to push the boundaries of what’s possible in Test/QA with emerging AI technology.

Tony Blank, FusionAuth, Sr. Director of Developer Marketing

Join Tony Blank of FusionAuth on a captivating journey through the evolution of authentication—from ancient clay seals to modern biometrics. Blending history, tech milestones, and humor, this talk explores how humanity has secured identity and access across ages, offering insights for developers, entrepreneurs, and tech enthusiasts alike. 

Andrew Peterson, MESCIUS, Technical Engagement Engineer

This presentation focuses on UX and UI design, why they are important, and how to follow the industry's best practices. We will take a closer and more precise look at these best practices so you can create an app or website that will have an advantage over the competition. 

Maher Hanafi, Betterworks, VP of Engineering

Contrary to the conventional narrative, the path to engineering leadership is far from linear. Successful leaders often emerge from diverse backgrounds and life experiences. In this session, I'll share my personal journey, which began with building leadership skills through online gaming and unexpectedly stumbled into entrepreneurship.

Discover how these unconventional experiences equipped me with the skills and perspectives needed to excel in leadership roles. We'll explore how diverse experiences, from hobbies and passions to unexpected challenges, can provide valuable insights and transferable skills that are essential for effective leadership.

Learn how to recognize and leverage your unique strengths, regardless of your traditional career path. We'll discuss how overcoming challenges, whether personal or professional, can build resilience, adaptability, and problem-solving skills. By understanding the unconventional paths of successful engineering leaders, you'll be inspired to embrace your own unique journey and discover your potential for leadership.

Neha Surendranath, LinkedIn, Sr. Technical Program Manager

In this technical session, we will explore advanced strategies to enhance the efficiency and reliability of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. We will also discover how implementing GitOps workflows with Argo CD and Flux can automate deployments and ensure consistency across environments. We'll also delve into advanced deployment techniques such as canary and blue-green releases to minimize downtime and reduce risk. 

Ben Ryves, GetYourGuide, Staff Site Reliability Engineer
Maggie Slukova, GetYourGuide, Staff Site Reliability Engineer

How difficult is it to minimize the toil of cluster upgrades while increasing confidence in deploying the changes?

Even when managed, cluster upgrades are an unavoidable part of cluster maintenance, yet they can also be a source of toil, stress and outages; either when upgrading Kubernetes itself or additional cluster components. Manually testing changes in staging clusters, deploying with a high sense of uncertainty - these time consuming tasks can be mitigated with tests. Add nifty automation and cluster management efforts are reduced to a bare minimum.

Is investing in cluster tests and automation worth it? Yes! This talk shows how a team of three engineers keeps multiple clusters continuously up-to-date with minimal time investment, effort and disruptions. By leveraging the e2e-framework and Helm, everything from Istio to cluster autoscaler is tested and seamlessly managed.