Getting ready for WeAreDevelopers WebDev & AI Day – 27/03/2025

On Thursday this week I will be in Vienna to moderate the WeAreDevelopers WebDev & AI Day and I am chuffed to bits that I managed to get such an amazing line-up together!

The event is an online event and you can follow on your computer. It starts at 16:00 and ends at 20:30. Tickets are 79 Euro and I can not stop you from showing the stream on a monitor and invite others along…

The show starts with Laurie Voss who I worked with at Yahoo and who now keeps posting insightful AI stuff almost weekly. He’ll talk about “AI and the future of software development”:

AI represents a massive change in the way software works, a leap forward. It also presents an opportunity for a massive change in the way software is written. AI-assisted coding may be an entirely new level of abstraction that sits on top of traditional programming languages and unlocks a huge new generation of software developers. In this talk, we’ll explore what this change looks like, how it came to be, and why it’s nothing to be scared of. And remember: there’s no such thing as “the fundamentals”.

Next is Hannah Foxwell with “Platform Engineering and DevEx for Your On-Prem LLMs”

I then lead a panel discussion on the topic of “Developing in an AI world – are we all demoted to reviewers?”

As developers, the new AI world seems great, but also strange. Originally we saw ourselves as creators, writers of code and owners of the functionality. In a world where more and more code is generated and users build throwaway applications it can feel like we’re losing control. In this panel we will discuss what that means in terms of ownership, security, quality and maybe find that not all is eaten as hot as it is cooked.

The all-star cast of this one is Thomas Steiner (Google), Laurie Voss (Llamaindex), Rizèl Scarlett (Block) and Rey Bango (my former Boss at Microsoft, colleague at Mozilla and also of Ajaxian fame). This will rock!

We then continue with Thomas Steiner covering “AI right in the browser with Chrome’s built-in AI APIs”

In this talk, Thomas Steiner from Google Chrome’s AI team dives into the various built-in AI APIs that the team is currently exploring. First, there’s the exploratory Prompt API that allows for free-form interactions with the Gemini Nano model. Second, there are the different task APIs that are fine-tuned to work well for a particular task like translations, language detection, summarization, and writing or rewriting. After introducing the APIs, the final part of the talk focuses on demos, applications, and use cases unlocked through these APIs.

Then there’s another highlight with Kris Rasmussen, the Chief Technology Officer of Figma, who will chat with me about ”
Honing craft and quality in an AI-powered world”:

Real-time, browser-based environments helped shift the product-building paradigm toward more open and collaborative ways of working. As barriers between design and development continue to come down, and AI-powered tools make it easier for anyone to build, the question today is how will product development continue to improve and evolve? How might functions and roles converge? And how might developers focus on quality and craftsmanship in an increasingly AI-powered world?

And the day ends with me spent and Simon Maple of Tessl talking about “Navigating AI Native Development: The Future of Software and the Power of Prompting”

AI is reshaping the way we build software, shifting from code-centric to spec-centric development—where developers define what they want, and AI determines how to achieve it. But how do we get there? In this session, we’ll explore what AI Native Development means for the open ecosystem, why it’s worth pursuing, and how we can apply lessons from cloud-native and DevOps transformations to make it a reality.We’ll also look at the practical side understanding how the craft of prompt engineering can help us refine structured specifications to improve results. By experimenting with different prompting techniques and validation methods, you’ll gain actionable strategies for guiding AI tools more effectively.

All of this for a measly 79 Euro, so why not go and get a ticket ?