Talks
A running list of the talks, panels, podcasts, and workshops I've given, newest first. Mostly distributed systems, event-driven design, machine learning, and lately how AI fits across the software lifecycle.
- 2026 9 talks
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Oct 2026
A Green Harness Is Not a Healthy Harness
Instrumenting a coding agent's harness against silent failure: standing rules that go stale, rule density that crosses an adherence cliff, and agents satisfying a failing gate by deleting the test behind it. A failure taxonomy for the harness itself, and the safety net for each failure.
Talk -
Sep 2026
Adopting AI Across Engineering
Private talk on adopting AI across an engineering organization, beyond individual tools and pilots.
Talk -
Sep 2026
A Green Harness Is Not a Healthy Harness
Guardrails go stale until they're confidently wrong: standing-rules files that rot, rule density that crosses adherence thresholds, and agents quietly disabling failing gates. Distinguishing guardrails agents can disable from ones that hold, with three strategies for treating harnesses as production systems.
Talk ▶ 32m -
Aug 2026
Human + AI: Redefining Engineering Excellence
ELC exec dinner on applying AI across the entire product development lifecycle, not just code generation, covering accountability, context engineering, guardrails and continuous learning with AI tools.
Talk -
Jul 2026
Engineer the Environment, Not Just the Prompt
Prompt engineering was phase one of AI-augmented development and context engineering was phase two, and it's hitting its ceiling. The next phase is harness engineering: shaping the whole environment an agent works in, not just the prompt.
Talk ▶ 53m -
Jun 2026
Why AI Tools Aren't Delivering Business Impact (And How to Fix It)
Peer-level discussion on closing the "ambition gap" between powerful models and measurable business impact, introducing the Embedded AI Co-Engineering model: external practitioners building and operating solutions alongside internal teams for safer deployment and measurable ROI.
Talk -
Feb 2026
Product Value Through intelligent Engineering
Breakfast roundtable on integrating AI into core business processes by deploying AI agents across the entire product delivery lifecycle, anchored by a Talon Outdoor case study on building AI into the core of a product.
Talkwith Andy Stevens
Also at Mumbai, India
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Jan 2026
intelligent Engineering Buildathon
A talk and hands-on build day on applying intelligent Engineering practices: using AI-assisted coding tools and agents as part of the development workflow to think better, move faster and build smarter.
Workshop - 2025 4 talks
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Dec 2025
Human + AI: intelligent Engineering in Action
Sahaj "emerge" roundtable on getting real value from AI across the entire SDLC: designing, building and deploying better solutions faster through collaboration between product, engineering and AI agents.
Talkwith George Song
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Nov 2025
What Happens Before and After the Code? AI Has a Role There Too!
How AI supports engineers across the full development lifecycle: sharpening requirements and design before code, test strategy and quality during, and debugging and operations after release.
Talk ▶ 2h 5m -
Apr 2025
Data Warfare: Tales from the Trenches
Hosted the closing Birds of a Feather: informal discussion groups on the data engineering war stories from the day, from data stores at scale to stream processing, petabyte-scale platforms, and change data capture.
BoF -
Mar 2025
Optimizing Business Decisions with AI: Evolutionary Algorithms in Action
How machine learning and guided search techniques like genetic algorithms tackle real-world business optimization problems, from formulating the problem mathematically to implementing it in Python.
Talk - 2024 2 talks
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Apr 2024
Responsible AI
Panel on how responsible AI keeps systems fair and transparent by aligning them with ethical principles, covering bias mitigation, legal risks, and balancing innovation with governance.
Panel ▶ 46m -
Jan 2024
From Concept to Code: Building a Q&A Bot Live with LLM
Live coding session building a Q&A bot from scratch using Large Language Models, taking a practical LLM application from concept to working code.
Talk ▶ 1h 7mwith Ajinkya Khot
- 2020 1 talk
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Jan 2020
Managing Data Pipelines at Scale
A conversation on the fun, the challenges, and the lessons learned managing data pipelines at scale, and what it takes to build reliable, scalable data infrastructure.
Podcast ▶ 57mwith Srimathi H
- 2019 3 talks
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Jul 2019
(Machine) Learning to Detect Fraudsters
How machine learning helps banks stay ahead of credit-card fraudsters with adaptive fraud detection systems as attacker behaviour keeps evolving.
Talk ▶ 1h 21mAlso at Pune, India
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Jun 2019
Releasing Event-Driven Microservices to Production Every Week
Building horizontally scalable, asynchronous event-driven microservice platforms and shipping to production every week, leaning on unit tests and consumer-driven contract tests, with examples from the payment lifecycle.
Talk - 2018 2 talks
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Feb 2018
Microservices? Serverless is the answer!
Comparing serverless and microservice implementations of an event-driven system across cross-functional requirements, and where serverless is the right choice.
Talk ▶ 59mAlso at New York, USA
- 2017 2 talks
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Apr 2017
Bridging the Gap: System Integration in an Event Driven System
Bridging the divide between modern event-sourced systems and more traditional architectures, with practical strategies for integrating legacy systems into event-driven ecosystems.
Talk ▶ 48mAlso at London, UK
Want me to speak at your event? Get in touch.