Tag: conferences

Polyglot Conference Vancouver 2025: Real Talk About AI, Industry Hubris, and the Art of Unconferencing

Just got back from another incredible Polyglot Conference in Vancouver, and I’m still processing everything that went down. There’s something magical about this event – it’s not your typical conference with polished presentations and vendor booth nonsense. It’s an unconference, which means the real magic happens in the conversations, the debates, and the genuine human connections that form when you put a room full of smart, opinionated developers together and let them talk about what actually matters.

The People Make the Conference

It was excellent to meet so many new people and catch up with friends I’ve not gotten to see in some time! This is what makes Polyglot special – it’s not just about the content, it’s about the community. I found myself in conversations with developers from startups to enterprise, from different countries and backgrounds, all bringing their unique perspectives to the table.

There’s something refreshing about being in a room where everyone is there because they genuinely want to be there, not because their company sent them or because they’re trying to sell something. The conversations flow naturally, the questions are real, and the debates are substantive. No one’s trying to impress anyone with buzzwords or corporate speak (Albeit we’ll often laugh our asses off at the nonsense of Corp speak and marketecture).

I caught up with folks I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic, met new faces who are doing interesting work, and had those serendipitous hallway conversations that often lead to the most valuable insights. The kind of conversations where you’re still talking an hour later, completely forgetting that there’s a scheduled session happening somewhere else.

The Unconference Format: Getting to the Heart of Things

The sessions were, as always with an Unconference jam packed with content and when we dove in we got to the heart of the topics real quick. This is the beauty of the unconference format – there’s no time for fluff or corporate posturing. People show up with real problems, real experiences, and real opinions, and we get straight to the point.

Unlike traditional conferences where you sit through 45-minute presentations that could have been 15-minute talks, unconference sessions are dynamic and responsive. Someone brings up a topic, the group decides if it’s worth exploring, and then we dive deep. If the conversation isn’t going anywhere, we pivot. If it’s getting interesting, we keep going. The format respects everyone’s time and intelligence.

The sessions I participated in covered everything from microservices architecture to team dynamics in the face of agentic AI tooling, from introspecting databases with AI tooling to the future of programming languages in the face of AI tooling. But the most compelling discussions were around AI – not the hype, not the marketing, but the real-world implications of what we’re building and how it’s changing our industry – for better or worse – and there’s a lot of expectation it’s bring a lot of the later.

Coping with AI: The Real Talk

Some of the talks included coping with AI, and just the general insanity that surrounds the technology and the hubris of the industry right now. This is where things got really interesting, because we weren’t talking about AI in the abstract or as some distant future possibility. We were talking about it as a present reality that’s already reshaping how we work, think, and build software.

The “coping with AI” discussion was particularly revealing. We’re not talking about how to use AI tools effectively – that’s the easy part. We’re talking about how to maintain our sanity and professional integrity in an industry that’s gone completely off the rails with AI hype and magical thinking.

The Insanity of AI Hype

The insanity surrounding AI right now is breathtaking. Every company is trying to cram AI into every product, whether it makes sense or not. We’re seeing AI-powered toasters and AI-enhanced paper clips, things that have boolean operation where they’re burning through tokens to make a yes or no decision. Utter madness on that front, that’s like half a tree burned up, a windmill rotation, or a chunk or two of coal just to flip a light switch! The technology has become a solution in search of problems, and the industry is happy to oblige with increasingly absurd use cases.

But the real insanity isn’t the over-application of the technology – it’s the way we’re talking about it. AI is being positioned as the solution to every problem, the answer to every question, the future of everything. It’s not just a tool, it’s become a religion. And like any religion, it’s creating true believers who can’t see the limitations, the risks, or the unintended consequences. Maybe “cult” should be added to the “religion” moniker?

The conversations at Polyglot were refreshing because they cut through this hype. We talked about the real limitations of AI, the actual problems it creates (holy bananas there are a lot of them), and the genuine challenges of working with these systems in production. No one was trying to sell anyone on the latest AI miracle – we were trying to understand what’s actually happening and how to deal with it. Simply put, what’s our day to day action plan to mitigate these problems and what are we doing when the hubris and house of cards comes crumbling down? After all, much of the world’s economy is hinged on AI becoming all the things! Nuts!

The Hubris of the Industry

The hubris of the industry right now is staggering. We’re building systems that we don’t fully understand, deploying them at scale, and then acting surprised when they don’t work as expected. The confidence with which people make claims about AI capabilities is matched only by the lack of evidence supporting those claims.

I heard stories from developers who are being asked to implement AI solutions that don’t make technical sense, from managers who think AI can replace human judgment, and from executives who believe that throwing more AI at a problem will automatically make it better. The disconnect between what AI can actually do and what people think it can do is enormous.

The hubris extends beyond just the technology to the way we’re thinking about the future. There’s this assumption that AI will solve all our problems, that it will make us more productive, that it will create a better world. But we’re not asking the hard questions about what we’re actually building, who it serves, and what the long-term consequences might be.

The Real Challenges

The real challenges of working with AI aren’t technical – they’re human. How do you maintain code quality when your team is generating code they don’t fully understand? How do you make architectural decisions when the tools can generate solutions faster than you can evaluate them? How do you maintain professional standards when the industry is racing to the bottom in terms of quality and sustainability?

These are the questions that kept coming up in our discussions. Not “how do I use ChatGPT to write better code” but “how do I maintain my professional integrity in an environment where AI is being used to cut corners and avoid hard thinking?”

The conversations were honest and sometimes uncomfortable. People shared stories of being pressured to use AI in ways that didn’t make sense, of watching their colleagues become dependent on tools they didn’t understand, and of struggling to maintain quality standards in an environment that prioritizes speed over everything else.

The Path Forward

The most valuable part of these discussions wasn’t just identifying the problems – it was exploring potential solutions. How do we maintain our professional standards while embracing the benefits of AI? How do we educate our teams and our organizations about the real capabilities and limitations of these tools? How do we build systems that are both powerful and maintainable?

The consensus seemed to be that we need to be more thoughtful about how we integrate AI into our work. Not as a replacement for human judgment, but as a tool that augments our capabilities. Not as a way to avoid hard problems, but as a way to tackle them more effectively.

We also need to be more honest about the limitations and risks. The industry’s tendency to oversell AI capabilities is creating unrealistic expectations and dangerous dependencies. We need to have more conversations about what AI can’t do, what it shouldn’t do, and what the consequences might be when it’s used inappropriately.

The Value of Real Conversation

What struck me most about these discussions was how different they were from the typical AI conversations you hear at other conferences. There was no posturing, no trying to impress anyone with the latest buzzwords, no corporate speak about “digital transformation” or “AI-first strategies“.

Instead, we had real conversations about real problems with real people who are dealing with these issues every day. People shared their failures as well as their successes, their concerns as well as their optimism, their questions as well as their answers.

This is the value of the unconference format and the Polyglot community. It creates a space where people can be honest about what’s actually happening, where they can ask the hard questions, and where they can explore ideas without the pressure to conform to industry narratives or corporate agendas.

Looking Ahead

As I reflect on the conference, I’m struck by how much the industry has changed since the last time I was at Polyglot. AI has gone from being a niche topic to dominating every conversation. The questions we’re asking have shifted from “what is AI?” to “how do we live with AI?” and “how do we maintain our humanity in an AI-driven world?”

The conversations at Polyglot give me hope that we can navigate this transition thoughtfully. Not by rejecting AI or embracing it uncritically, but by engaging with it honestly and maintaining our professional standards and human values.

The industry needs more spaces like this – places where people can have real conversations about real problems without the hype, the marketing, or the corporate agenda getting in the way. Places where we can explore the hard questions and work together to find better answers.

The Takeaway

The biggest takeaway from Polyglot this year is that we’re at a critical juncture. The AI revolution isn’t coming – it’s here. And the choices we make now about how we integrate these tools into our work, our teams, and our industry will shape the future of software development for decades to come.

We can either let the hype and hubris drive us toward a future where software becomes disposable, quality becomes optional, and human judgment becomes obsolete. Or we can choose a different path – one where AI augments our capabilities without replacing our humanity, where we maintain our professional standards while embracing new tools, and where we build systems that are both powerful and sustainable.

The conversations at Polyglot suggest that there are people in the industry who are choosing the latter path. People who are thinking critically about AI, asking the hard questions, and working to build a future that serves human needs rather than corporate interests.

That gives me hope. And it makes me even more committed to being part of these conversations, to asking the hard questions, and to working with others who are trying to build a better future for our industry.

The Polyglot (Un)Conference and (Un)Conference like events continue to be one of the most valuable events in the software development community. If you’re looking for real conversations about real problems with real people, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The conference was such a good time with such great topics, introductions, and interactions that I’ve already bought a ticket for next year. If you’re interested in joining the conversation, check out polyglotsoftware.com and grab your tickets at Eventbrite.

Next Week is Hasura Conf 2021

Next week is Hasura Con 2021, which you can register here, and just attend instead of reading any further. But if you want some reasons to attend, read on, I’ll provide a few in this blog entry!

First Reason – What Have People Built w/ Hasura

You’re curious to learn about what is implemented with Hasura’s API and tooling. We’ve got several people that will be talking about what they’ve built with Hasura, including;

Second Reason – Curious About GraphQL

You’re still curious about GraphQL but haven’t really delved into what it is or what it can do. This is a chance, for just a little of our time, to check out some of the features and capabilities in specific detail. The following are a few talks I’d suggest, to get an idea of around what GraphQL can do and what various aspects of it provides.

Third Reason – Minimal Time, Maximum Benefit

Attending the conference, which is online, will only require whatever amount of time you’d like to put into it! There’s no cost, registration is free, so join for the talks you want or even join me for one of the topic tables or workshops that I’ll be hosting and teaching!

Hope to see you in the chat rooms! If you’ve got any questions feel free to reach out and ask me, my DMs are open on Twitter @Adron and you can always just leave a comment here too!

NOLA Vieux Carré Hack n’ Life n’ Lagniappe

I’ve been organizing conferences (with other awesome organizers of course, it’s never a singular person getting that work done!) for a long while now and they’re what they are. Then along came the pandemic and splat, in person conferences became extinct. I’m sure they’ll be back, but I’m not entirely sure they ought to come back. At least, they ought not come back in the same way they existed pre-pandemic time.

Mississippi River in New Orleans along the ole’ Crescent

There’s another type of get together that I’ve been thinking of that I’m really excited about. This experience, I was fortunate enough to experience a bunch of years ago in New Orleans with an awesome group of folks. To add a little context to this, I lived in New Orleans for a good while and grew up about 45 minutes from the city across the state line in Mississippi. With that, I feel like I’ve got a little bit of context for living the New Orleans lifestyle. I must add, it is distinctively and specifically a very unique lifestyle among these United States. Living a New Orleans life is like nothing else in these United States, not even remotely!

When I lived in the area I loved many aspects of this city and there were aspects that I was not happy with. The city has a few parts that make the famous south side of Chicago seem like a peaceful hippy village, but on the other side of the spectrum New Orleans has an intense passion and love among its people. The city is amazing, beautiful, and honestly a marvel of engineering (it’s below sea level). This city, always standing as a monument to passion, music, love, and more is prominent throughout the city. This passion and love of life itself is a positive among positives that in the end, vastly outweigh any of the negatives.

A Dose of That NOLA Life

It’s that famous street y’all!

This adventure I experienced a number of years ago went something like this. In 2010 I had a conference to attend where I was going to speak about various data analysis techniques, coding project ideas, and related technologies around web and data analytics. At the time I worked for a company called WebTrends with a solid bunch. The conference was all set and would be a great time, but it wasn’t the key experience of this trip.

Some friends with a business startup that also were attending the conference decided to rent a house down near Decatur Street. They rented this house and turned it into a coder’s house for a full week! It was a wildly entertaining, enjoyable, unique, and worthwhile experience to undertake. In addition we were wildly productive! Implementing a number of features, swarming on some ideas, and writing up a number of ideas for future implementation while thinking out the design in a great thorough way. It was spectacular!

But there was more, much more to this truly excellent trip. We had access to New Orleans after all which is well known for truly epic food – arguably some of the best options – to explore flavors, tastes, and truly expansive ideas in foodie explorations! The local creole food, the surrounding local southern food, and the combinations therein are unto themselves not comparable in any other part of the United States. Also no, New York, San Francisco, Portland, or anywhere doesn’t even come close in food comparisons and I’m not even going to engage in that silliness. New Orleans food is a culinary delight in it’s own world ranking! As can be see below…

In addition since I knew the city well there were streets to walk, places to explore such as Jax Brewery, the markets, the levies along the riverfront, a riverwalk that’s great, steamship paddle wheelers that traverse the Mississippi river for some amazing explorations, views, and food too!

Ok, ok, ok so that’s a lot of me telling you about the awesomeness of New Orleans. If you’re not into the idea of exploring or visiting the city I can’t really do much more to sell you on the trip. But the next aspect of this post I’ll detail an idea of forming a krewe to head south to the city of New Orleans, build awesome software, eat wonderful food, and generally live the relaxed life for a solid week or so. The idea is this krewe will be a parade of its own that’ll setup shop and live this for the escape, the celebration, and the experience of it all! If this sounds interesting to you, read on, here’s the details.

How This Would Work

For some, we’d join onboard the City of New Orleans, the Crescent, or the Sunset Limited into New Orleans. For others the option of choice may be to fly into the Louis Armstrong Airport or even take the train in from Chicago, Memphis, or other place onboard the City of New Orleans or out of Washington DC, Charlotte, Atlanta, Montgomery or elsewhere onboard the Crescent. Upon arriving we’d converge at the house or houses we’d choose for this adventure where we’d live for the week and get setup for the projects we’d do during the week. That night we’d gather for a grand dinner at our first excellent destination.

Day one dinner at Lil Dizzy’s Cafe & Coding Plans

The first day we’d all get breakfast at Lil Dizzy’s Cafe or somewhere thereabouts. There we’ll get fueled up with a most epic food win and then depart to gather to plot what we’ll create for the week. This is when we’d get a full plan and some goals together as a group. Decide if we want to break out further into groups (depending on our overall group size) and such. We’d find a good place (likely organized well before the trip) and gather there, post-wicked-awesome-amazing good breakfast, and get into all this. This one goal, would be the goal for day one!

Looking at that sinking (yes, by almost an inch per year!) Central Business District in New Orleans!

Day two rolling in… later rise, more good food, and coding time

Day two rolling in. We’d rise a bit later, get some piping hot coffee and maybe a kicker at Cafe Du Monde for the start of day two. Once collected we’d gather for some day hacking or maybe checking out the brewery blocks (it’s more than just breweries, just sayin’). Then we’d get in some evening coding, building, and creating then back into some food and entertainment of whatever sort for the evening. Possibly some jazz at Julius Kimbrough’s Prime Example, Little Gem Saloon, or the Spotted Cat. Either way, a good time and good evening however we want to slice and dice it up.

Day three, onward and forward and advance!

Day three and onward would continue along this theme. Dynamic organization with a loosely coupled and loosely designed scheduled workflow. Mostly to keep it flexible to live NOLA while we’re there. All the while we get to build something as a krewe (team, crew, cohort, however you’d call the group)!

This would continue for the rest of the week. I’ll have more ideas, more to this proposal, more to this trip coming in subsequent blog posts. This post has one purpose, to get the idea introduced to you dear reader and to start the conversation about getting this event put together. If you’d be interested in this idea, please reach out to me via Twitter @Adron, or you can message me via my Contact Form, or if you have some other means – txt me, sms me, slack me, or whatever – that’ll work too. Whatever the medium, let’s get a conversation started about traveling down to the Crescent City for an EPIC week of food, life, music, and hacking together a solution for whatever it is we create!

For more on this, follow me on Twitter, stay tuned here on the blog, and eventually we’ll get an organizing krewe together and start getting together more specifics, like dates and travel times, core ideas, and more.

Cheers!

References:

  • New Orleans skyline as featured image above is from Wikipedia Commons.
  • I did try to make sure there wasn’t rights issues with all those glorious food pictures, but will fix if anything is contested.

2x More 2019 Seattle Area Conferences

We’re halfway through the year now. In Seattle what’s going on in this later half? Here are a few of the conferences, camps, or code related events I’ve purchased tickets to over the last few months.

Seattle Code Camp – September 14th – I have attended a few, and even spoken at some of the code camps here in Seattle. Every time I’ve had a good time and enjoyed a number of very educational conversations. For an idea of the range of topics, also check out the schedule – it’s HUGE!

API City Conference – September 5th – API City is another non-profit community conference that I attended for the first time last year. Again, the sessions were good but the conversations, like with Seattle Code Camp, are what made this conference valuable.

Both of these conferences are extremely high value for the dollar. Arguably, I’d say these provide more value than some of the conferences that are in the $2000-3000 price range, which is mind boggling, but that’s what you get when the community comes together on something that people have a shared interest in!

Either one, or both, hope to see you there.

 

TRIP REPORT: O’Reilly Velocity & Software Architecture Conf 2019

This past week the O’Reilly Velocity and Software Architecture Conferences took place. I’ve attended both before, the 2nd time for Velocity in San Jose and the 2nd time for Software Architecture, however this time in San Jose and the last I attended was in London. The locations for these conferences dictate much about what is presented and how conversations, meeting and interacting, learning, and explorations take place during the conference, but more on those specifics in a moment.

The overarching theme from keynotes and many of the conversations I had met on a few key topics:

  1. When you’re building software, and you want to do it well you first and foremost must, absolutely must, invest in the people building your software.
  2. Focus on simplicity, remove complexity at every opportunity.
  3. Organizational structure can have direct impact in the complexity or simplicity of software, structure your organization efficiently and make every effort to keep it simple.

TLDR; Keep your people happy, focus on simplicity, minimize organizational noise from bureaucracy.

Topically Elaborating on Edge and Serverless

Ok, so a number of conversations came up around edge computing and serverless. Both interesting, but it also seems like there isn’t a strong play for the Enterprise is either space just yet. At this point however, a lot of enterprises are struggling with their Kubernetes, Cloud, and Hybrid solutions enough as it is that they haven’t even broached the edge compute and serverless realm. But that hasn’t stopped a lot of forward thinking individuals to start tackling how to cut out a useful spectrum of application with both edge and serverless.

Serverless Oh My!

Serverless, like so many other names, is kind of a garbage name at first. It effectively tells us nothing useful. It’s a word that requires more words just to give it meaning. It’s kind of like if I said “I like food!” What does this even mean? So, everybody eats food and most people like it, so what does “I like food!” actually mean? Same with serverless, because the first thing it doesn’t mean is a system that has no servers. What it generally means is something about your applications and you not doing anything with servers. It’s the mythic NoOps by simply removing the computers somehow.

Serverless, or simply code that executes via compute, and you get a result, has actually been around for some time. There were a number of startups that were well ahead of AWS Lambda and the other respective implementations that Azure and GCP have. These startups had been attempting to usher in what it took AWS’s massiveness and clout to actually get people to pay attention to. Serverless however has gone far beyond merely Lambda at AWS and now we’ve got to contend not only with the option in the existing cloud providers but where, how, and when can we get it into our data centers! The TLDR is that enterprise wants serverless and they’re interested in throwing it onto Kubernetes or whatever they’ve got. But often the infrastructure and systems to really make use of this simply isn’t there.

Most of the conversations I had evolved around the who, what, where, when, and how do we make use of these options for what we do? This is where most companies, at least enterprise and large companies, currently seem to be in the market. Then there are the companies that have already made the leap and are doing all sorts of stuff with Lambda and related serverless offerings. The gulf, that middle ground, doesn’t seem to have been broached by many others. Everybody, anecdotally of course, seems to be either trying to figure out how to start or already made the leap!

Edge Compute

This kept coming up, regardless of how or what people defined it as, it came up as something a number of people were very interested in. This notion, loosely based around using edge devices; smart phones, IoT devices, your car, or your washer for example, it could be almost anything. These devices do compute on the edge and thus the term. However it’s interesting because it isn’t like, for example, cloud computing that has core features like compute, storage, and related elements. Edge computing can run the gamut of any device doing any kind of work and the related capabilities of that device. It kind of leaves the space wide open. However, there were a few focal points that kept coming up.

The most common topic that came up around edge computing was doing tasks at point of presence. Such as having a phone do facial recognition, computing path finding (i.e. traffic directions), and related compute on the device versus round tripping it back to the cloud. It almost seems like after all these years of pushing things to the server we’re really starting in earnest to bring smart processes and tasks back to the devices we have in hand – no pun intended. It’s an interesting space, interesting paradigms, and I’m still not ready to call a specific thing within the world of edge compute and say, “that’s the next billion dollar idea”. Largely because, there are a lot of billion dollar ideas out there these days.

Speaking of edge compute and serverless, my fellow DataStaxian also had a few of these conversations on said topics. Patrick wrote up a post on a few observations over on the DataStax blog “Velocity Conference Shows What’s Gaining Velocity in Data Management“.

Geographic Location

As I mentioned, this set of conferences is in San Jose, the home of Silicon Valley, but the southern segment of the area. It’s a walk-able area with a number of places to break out from the conference and really dig into the hallway tracks (i.e. impromptu conversations!) that come up. For those willing to jump on the light rail, or scooter around, San Jose opens up even more to the local area providing a wide variety of coffee, food, and other operations to share conversations over.

All in all, the geographic location for the event is solid, being in the center of the city where it is. However one issue did arise, the Marriott lost power as an electrical fire in the control room of the multi-story hotel blew out the power. At last I checked upon leaving, it still didn’t have power! With the temperature at 105f going on multiple days at this point, the hotel because extremely hot inside, and being a kind of sealed airspace the air calculators also weren’t refreshing the air. That left a number of guests in less than stellar condition to attend, let alone attain value, from the conference events. Myself I ended up checking out in short order, getting sick the last day of the conference anyway, and being unable to provide the presentation that I had paired up with Lena (@lenadroid) for! I’ve been thinking, that maybe she and I can provide an online version of it for those that had wanted to hear us present on “Flexible Cloud Architectures: Decision Making Best Practices“.

Next year’s Velocity looks like it’ll be in Santa Clara, which doesn’t really excite me as it’s kind of a nebula of sprawling suburbia of boredom. This is were location becomes fundamental to what will or what can be the potential of secondary and tertiary conversations at a conference like this. Don’t get me wrong, the hallway track is excellent, but having options to step out and walk across the street from the event to converse further adds a tremendous value.

Santa Clara simply doesn’t do that unfortunately.

The fortunate thing between now and then, albeit the conference is moving to Santa Clara, they’re having subsequent conferences in the Velocity series in Berlin, and Software Architecture Conf series in the amazing cities of New York and Berlin. Those locations are worth traveling to for far more than a conference, increasing my interest in attending both of those future events. I’m looking forward to these!

Twitter Talk @VelocityConf

From @DataStaxDevs a thread! Click through for all ~17 parts.

Some Build Engineer Work – Click through for the whole construction thread.

Some of the Keynote Threads

Alena Hall – @lenadroid

Jessica Kerr – @jessitron

…and there were a bunch of others too, solid, check out the hash tag of #velocityconf to read up on more.

The Lagniappe

After the conference I finally managed to pick up a pocket Constitution.

If you’re ever in search of good coffee in San Jose, one place I found that’s tops is Academic Coffee, both the coffee and service are great. Good jovial crew and lots of cyclists in and out.

Making progress on the CaSMa, tweeted a bit on the topic while en route to the conference. If you’d like to get involved, please do let me know!

Other arbitrary statistics:

  • Stickers collected: 11 unique, ~7 of each. Total: 77 stickers.
  • T-shirt Swag: 2.
  • Conversations @ DataStax Booth: 11
  • Hallway Track Conversations: 7
  • Coffee Consumed: 9 over 3 days.
  • Twitter Filters Discussed: 123.
  • Fuel burned to compensate for electrical fire damage for the time of the conference: Approximately 5k gallons of fuel for the Marriott Hotel and no idea how much more fuel was or is still being burned to power the hotel.
  • Times the power still went off even with the diesel engine power trailer attached: 4.