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Tech Talks Weekly
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Tech Talks Weekly #103

#softwareengineering #programming #webdev #ai

Happy Wednesday 👋 and a warm welcome to Tech Talks Weekly #103!

Almost 20 years ago, Patrick Debois gave a name to a movement that reshaped how we ship software: DevOps. This year, he’s pointing at the next shift, and it might be just as big. What if the artifact we should be versioning, reviewing and observing isn’t the code anymore, but the context we feed our AI agents? You’ll find Patrick’s talk in the 🏆 featured talks.

On a different note, I experimented a little with the structure and included 🗄️ Talks and podcasts by category. I really hope you’ll enjoy the new format!

As always, if you found something useful, hit the ❤️ or leave a comment. Thank you 🙏 and now let’s jump right in!

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🏆 Featured this week

Here are our top recommendations this week. Watch now or bookmark!

1. “Context Is the New Code — Patrick Debois, Tessl” from AI Engineer Europe 2026

Conference ⸱ +43k views ⸱ May 3, 2026 ⸱ 00h 27m 14s

tldw: Context we supply to the agents is starting to matter as much as code. Yet while code has version control, review, testing, CI/CD and production observability, the prompts, rules and memory that drive agents are still managed ad hoc. Patrick Debois, godfather of DevOps and Product DevRel lead at Tessl, argues context needs its own engineering discipline and introduces the Context Development Lifecycle (Generate, Evaluate, Distribute, Observe).

https://youtube.com/watch?v=bSG9wUYaHWU

2. “Keynote: Precision in Type System Design - José Valim | ElixirConf EU 2026” from ElixirConf EU 2026

Conference ⸱ +2k views ⸱ May 1, 2026 ⸱ 01h 03m 24s

tldw: Four years ago at ElixirConf EU, José Valim, creator of Elixir, announced a plan to develop a type system for the language, divided into three distinct milestones. With the upcoming Elixir v1.20 release, the language is finally completing the first one: type inference across all language constructs. Join this keynote to understand exactly what that means for your daily work and where the project is heading next.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ay-gnCqDw9o

3. “The C4 Model - Beyond The Basics • Simon Brown • YOW! 2025” from YOW! 2025

Conference ⸱ +1k views ⸱ May 4, 2026 ⸱ 00h 36m 04s

tldw: The C4 model for visualising software architecture keeps gaining traction, with many organisations adopting it as their preferred way to document software architecture. Simon Brown, the model's creator and author of The C4 Model (O'Reilly), takes you on a tour of the common questions he hears on a regular basis: how to model shared code, microservices, message-driven architectures and more. He also shares how to scale C4 all the way up to an entire system landscape.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FqTL-_tLf6I

4. “The 3 Words That Secretly Drive Developer Productivity & Motivation • Yanina Ledovaya • GOTO 2025” from GOTO Copenhagen 2025

Conference ⸱ +900 views ⸱ Apr 30, 2026 ⸱ 00h 38m 05s

tldw: What if a decades-old psychology framework holds a useful key to developer productivity? Yanina Ledovaya, DX Research Team Lead at JetBrains and a cognitive psychologist by background, dissects Self-Determination Theory's three main pillars (autonomy, competence and relatedness) to show how they shape satisfaction, efficiency and communication on software teams. This talk shares practical theoretical framework with strategies grounded in research that boost satisfaction and productivity in your team / organization.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=y0j9rzME8YY

5. “Why Duolingo Abandoned ECS for Kubernetes: Lessons from the Trenches” from InfoQ Dev Summit Munich 2025

Conference ⸱ +500 views ⸱ May 4, 2026 ⸱ 00h 43m 06s

tldw: Duolingo manages 500+ microservices for 128M users. So why risk moving stable, working infrastructure from AWS ECS to Kubernetes? Franka Passing, Senior Platform Engineer at Duolingo, delivers a Report from the Trenches on their massive EKS migration: the move to Blue-Green deployments and ephemeral environments, the shift to IPv6-only pods, the human element of recency bias during outages and how they automated validation to keep 99.9% reliability through the transition.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=25-zrmB1vbY

6. “30 Years in Tech: Why Your Career Ladder is Actually a Squiggle” from QCon London 2025

Conference ⸱ +500 views ⸱ Apr 30, 2026 ⸱ 00h 47m 58s

tldw: The path to Principal Engineer is not a straight line: it is a broken comb. After nearly 30 years in software engineering, Sophie Weston, Principal Engineer at ClearBank and co-organizer of DevOpsDays London, reveals why deep technical expertise is only the baseline for leadership. Whether you are aiming for a Principal role or leading a department, this talk shows how to navigate the Engineer-Manager Pendulum and why the most valuable leadership skills often come from outside the IDE.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=m04PKJIgHMI

7. “AI Literacy for Developers: Thinking Clearly While AI Writes the Code” from JAX London 2025

Conference ⸱ <100 views ⸱ May 5, 2026 ⸱ 00h 19m 05s

tldw: For decades, software engineering literacy meant mastering languages, frameworks and the mechanics of writing code. Russ Miles, author of Antifragile Software and CEO of ChaosIQ, argues those skills are still required but there is a shift in the value developers now bring: thinking clearly about systems, intent, constraints and feedback loops.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=l5V3NODZIA0

8. “The Human Scalability Problem: Why Your Teams Don’t Scale Like Your Code” from QCon San Francisco 2025

Conference ⸱ <100 views ⸱ May 4, 2026

tldw: While systems scale, human cooperation often breaks down under communication overload and lost context. Charlotte de Jong Schouwenburg, business psychologist and co-founder of Bravely, dives into the human bottlenecks of hyper-growth and shares some nice tools for behavioral scalability: communication architecture and engineering trust. You will walk away with really interesting strategies to help engineering leaders maintain high-performing, autonomous teams without sacrificing speed or culture.

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/human-scalability/

Found something useful? Leave a comment. Thank you 🙏

9. “The Future of Code Review: Stop Reviewing Line-by-Line, Start Governing AI Agents” from Tech Lead Journal

Podcast ⸱ May 4, 2026 ⸱ 01h 15m 27s

tldl: What does code review mean when AI writes most of the code? The answer is not to review more carefully: it is a fundamentally different process built around rules, agents and governance rather than diffs and comments. Itamar Friedman, founder and CEO of Qodo.ai, traces the evolution of code review across generations, explains why traditional static analysis is no longer sufficient and presents what a modern quality and governance layer looks like. He also introduces the concept of "shift up" (extending quality checks into the planning phase so technical product managers can contribute directly to shipping features) and explains how teams can move from vibe coding to a more viable development.

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/techleadjournal/episodes/The-Future-of-Code-Review-Stop-Reviewing-Line-by-Line--Start-Governing-AI-Agents-e3ipg22

📆 New talks

Here's the complete list of all the talks published since the last issue, grouped by conference, and ordered by number of views for your convenience.

AI Coding Summit 2026 (1), AI Engineer Europe 2026 (22), Android Makers 2026 (2), Conference Talks 2026 (5), Devoxx Poland 2024 (3), ElixirConf EU 2026 (5), GOTO Copenhagen 2025 (1), GOTO Serverless Bangalore 2025 (1), GeeCON 2025 (3), InfoQ Dev Summit Munich 2025 (1), JAX London 2025 (2), JCON Europe 2026 (2), JavaOne 2026 (2), KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 (1), NDC Security 2026 (1), PyData Boston 2025 (2), QCon AI New York 2025 (1), QCon London 2025 (1), QCon San Francisco 2025 (3), Spring I/O 2026 (10), Vuejs Amsterdam 2026 (7), YOW! 2025 (2)

📆 New podcasts

Here's the complete list of all the podcasts published since the last issue.

Go to 📆 New podcasts

📈 Most-watched talks

Find the most watched talks from the past 7d, 30d, 90d, 6m, and 12m.

Go to 📈 Most-watched

🗄️ More this week, by category

This issue's talks, sorted by view count and organized by topic.

AI Engineering

  1. “Everything I Learned Training Frontier Small Models — Maxime Labonne, Liquid AI” from AI Engineer Europe 2026 — Conference ⸱ +50k views ⸱ Apr 29, 2026 ⸱ 00h 20m 13s

  2. “Context Is the New Code — Patrick Debois, Tessl” from AI Engineer Europe 2026 — Conference ⸱ +43k views ⸱ May 3, 2026 ⸱ 00h 27m 14s

  3. “Codex and Subagents — Vaibhav Srivastav & Katia Gil Guzman, OpenAI” from AI Engineer Europe 2026 — Conference ⸱ +22k views ⸱ Apr 29, 2026 ⸱ 01h 01m 59s

→ See 36 more AI Engineering talks on Tech Talks Weekly Plus

AWS

  1. “Serverless Agents: Real-World Tooling with Strands SDK, MCP & AWS • Akshatha Laxmi • GOTO 2025” from GOTO Serverless Bangalore 2025 — Conference ⸱ +200 views ⸱ May 5, 2026 ⸱ 00h 21m 21s

BEAM

  1. “Update from the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation - Dan Janowski | ElixirConf EU 2026” from ElixirConf EU 2026 — Conference ⸱ +300 views ⸱ May 1, 2026 ⸱ 00h 11m 50s

Data Engineering

  1. “What’s new in Spring for Apache Kafka 4? by Tim van Baarsen @ Spring I/O 2026” from Spring I/O 2026 — Conference ⸱ +1k views ⸱ May 5, 2026 ⸱ 00h 51m 06s

  2. “Abhishek Murthy, Evans Addo - Classifying Time Series with Foundation Models (PyData Boston)” from PyData Boston 2025 — Conference ⸱ +400 views ⸱ May 5, 2026 ⸱ 00h 43m 38s

  3. “Julia Mertens - Large Language Models can Hallucinate Speaker Transitions (PyData Boston)” from PyData Boston 2025 — Conference ⸱ +100 views ⸱ May 5, 2026 ⸱ 00h 46m 35s

→ See 1 more Data Engineering talk on Tech Talks Weekly Plus

Data Science / Machine Learning

  1. “Abhishek Murthy, Evans Addo - Classifying Time Series with Foundation Models (PyData Boston)” from PyData Boston 2025 — Conference ⸱ +400 views ⸱ May 5, 2026 ⸱ 00h 43m 38s

  2. “Julia Mertens - Large Language Models can Hallucinate Speaker Transitions (PyData Boston)” from PyData Boston 2025 — Conference ⸱ +100 views ⸱ May 5, 2026 ⸱ 00h 46m 35s

DevOps

  1. “I Can See Clearly Now: Observability of JVM & Spring Boot 2-3-4 apps @ Spring I/O 2026” from Spring I/O 2026 — Conference ⸱ +1k views ⸱ May 4, 2026 ⸱ 00h 50m 49s

Elixir

  1. “Keynote: Precision in Type System Design - José Valim | ElixirConf EU 2026” from ElixirConf EU 2026 — Conference ⸱ +2k views ⸱ May 1, 2026 ⸱ 01h 03m 24s

  2. “Keynote: DurableServer: Always Running Somewhere - Chris McCord | ElixirConf EU 2026” from ElixirConf EU 2026 — Conference ⸱ +1k views ⸱ May 1, 2026 ⸱ 00h 51m 51s

  3. “Update from the Phoenix Team - Steffen Deusch | ElixirConf EU 2026” from ElixirConf EU 2026 — Conference ⸱ +500 views ⸱ May 1, 2026 ⸱ 00h 19m 12s

→ See 1 more Elixir talk on Tech Talks Weekly Plus

Java

  1. “Bootiful Spring Boot 4 by Josh Long @ Spring I/O 2026” from Spring I/O 2026 — Conference ⸱ +23k views ⸱ Apr 29, 2026 ⸱ 00h 42m 32s

  2. “Claude Code for Spring Developers by Thomas Schilling @ Spring I/O 2026” from Spring I/O 2026 — Conference ⸱ +10k views ⸱ Apr 29, 2026 ⸱ 00h 43m 55s

  3. “The JDK Client Desktop : 2026 and Still Swinging” from JavaOne 2026 — Conference ⸱ +7k views ⸱ May 3, 2026 ⸱ 00h 52m 52s

→ See 9 more Java talks on Tech Talks Weekly Plus

Kotlin

  1. “Supercharge Spring Boot Tests with Kotlin DSL Power by Urs Peter @ Spring I/O 2026” from Spring I/O 2026 — Conference ⸱ +1k views ⸱ Apr 30, 2026 ⸱ 00h 50m 22s

Kubernetes

  1. “Why Duolingo Abandoned ECS for Kubernetes: Lessons from the Trenches” from InfoQ Dev Summit Munich 2025 — Conference ⸱ +500 views ⸱ May 4, 2026 ⸱ 00h 43m 06s

Misc

  1. “The C4 Model - Beyond The Basics • Simon Brown • YOW! 2025” from YOW! 2025 — Conference ⸱ +1k views ⸱ May 4, 2026 ⸱ 00h 36m 04s

  2. “The 3 Words That Secretly Drive Developer Productivity & Motivation • Yanina Ledovaya • GOTO 2025” from GOTO Copenhagen 2025 — Conference ⸱ +900 views ⸱ Apr 30, 2026 ⸱ 00h 38m 05s

  3. “Evolving KServe: The Unified Model Inference Platform for Both Predictive and... F. Spolti & J. Lee” from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 — Conference ⸱ +500 views ⸱ Apr 30, 2026 ⸱ 00h 32m 40s

→ See 10 more Misc talks on Tech Talks Weekly Plus

Mobile

  1. “Supercharge Spring Boot Tests with Kotlin DSL Power by Urs Peter @ Spring I/O 2026” from Spring I/O 2026 — Conference ⸱ +1k views ⸱ Apr 30, 2026 ⸱ 00h 50m 22s

  2. “Thriving in an AI era 🔮 - Android Makers by droidCon 2026” from Android Makers 2026 — Conference ⸱ <100 views ⸱ May 5, 2026 ⸱ 00h 33m 55s

  3. “What's new in Android Studio's AI Agent? - Android Makers by droidCon 2026” from Android Makers 2026 — Conference ⸱ <100 views ⸱ May 6, 2026 ⸱ 00h 38m 39s

React

  1. “Reza Bar - Reactivity in Vue Thinking in Signals” from Vuejs Amsterdam 2026 — Conference ⸱ +300 views ⸱ Apr 30, 2026 ⸱ 00h 26m 49s

  2. “Signals vs React Hooks: Battle for Clean Code • Henry Lagarde, Estelle Thou • Devoxx Poland 2024” from Devoxx Poland 2024 — Conference ⸱ <100 views ⸱ Apr 29, 2026 ⸱ 00h 23m 30s

Ruby / Rails

  1. “Agent-Agnostic Guardrails: Universal Java Code Quality with AGENTS.MD and Static Analysis” from JavaOne 2026 — Conference ⸱ +2k views ⸱ May 5, 2026 ⸱ 00h 48m 03s

Security

  1. “AppSec Security: The SDLC in the age of agentic - Jon Mccoy - NDC Security 2026” from NDC Security 2026 — Conference ⸱ +600 views ⸱ May 4, 2026 ⸱ 00h 35m 02s

  2. “SerKo Vincent Ngai - When Tree Shaking Fails: Security Risks in Nuxt & Vue” from Vuejs Amsterdam 2026 — Conference ⸱ +100 views ⸱ May 1, 2026 ⸱ 00h 25m 56s

  3. “Ramona Schwering Vue tiful Defense Let's draw Security” from Vuejs Amsterdam 2026 — Conference ⸱ <100 views ⸱ Apr 29, 2026 ⸱ 00h 31m 09s

→ See 1 more Security talk on Tech Talks Weekly Plus

Software Architecture

  1. “Keynote: Precision in Type System Design - José Valim | ElixirConf EU 2026” from ElixirConf EU 2026 — Conference ⸱ +2k views ⸱ May 1, 2026 ⸱ 01h 03m 24s

  2. “Beyond Orchestration: An Open Source Architecture for Agentic Systems - Ashok Prakash” from Conference Talks 2026 — Conference ⸱ +100 views ⸱ May 4, 2026 ⸱ 00h 25m 01s

  3. “GeeCON 2025: Natan Silnitsky - Reinventing Microservices: Efficiency and Innovation with Single-RunT” from GeeCON 2025 — Conference ⸱ <100 views ⸱ May 3, 2026 ⸱ 00h 50m 05s

Vue

  1. “Reza Bar - Reactivity in Vue Thinking in Signals” from Vuejs Amsterdam 2026 — Conference ⸱ +300 views ⸱ Apr 30, 2026 ⸱ 00h 26m 49s

  2. “Julien Huang - Stop making these Nuxt & Vue mistakes: introducing @nuxt/hints 1.0” from Vuejs Amsterdam 2026 — Conference ⸱ +200 views ⸱ May 2, 2026 ⸱ 00h 27m 09s

  3. “SerKo Vincent Ngai - When Tree Shaking Fails: Security Risks in Nuxt & Vue” from Vuejs Amsterdam 2026 — Conference ⸱ +100 views ⸱ May 1, 2026 ⸱ 00h 25m 56s

→ See 3 more Vue talks on Tech Talks Weekly Plus

Web / Frontend

  1. “Reza Bar - Reactivity in Vue Thinking in Signals” from Vuejs Amsterdam 2026 — Conference ⸱ +300 views ⸱ Apr 30, 2026 ⸱ 00h 26m 49s

  2. “Julien Huang - Stop making these Nuxt & Vue mistakes: introducing @nuxt/hints 1.0” from Vuejs Amsterdam 2026 — Conference ⸱ +200 views ⸱ May 2, 2026 ⸱ 00h 27m 09s

  3. “SerKo Vincent Ngai - When Tree Shaking Fails: Security Risks in Nuxt & Vue” from Vuejs Amsterdam 2026 — Conference ⸱ +100 views ⸱ May 1, 2026 ⸱ 00h 25m 56s

→ See 4 more Web / Frontend talks on Tech Talks Weekly Plus

Web Assembly

  1. “WebAssembly and the Future of the JVM Ecosystem by Andrea Peruffo @ Spring I/O 2026” from Spring I/O 2026 — Conference ⸱ +1k views ⸱ Apr 30, 2026 ⸱ 00h 43m 49s

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Enjoy the weekend ☀️ and see you next week!

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