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M. Scott Ford
Emily Bache Bache Consulting
Yoan Thirion Pyxis Suisse
Bhaskar Bharat Sawant Cornerstone Building Brands
Ray Myers OpenHands
M. Scott Ford
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Learn what to expect, what the rules are, etc.
M. Scott Ford Software Mender | Speaker | LinkedIn Learning Instructor,
M. Scott Ford, who has been called the "Bob Vila of the internet", is a polyglot developer who, at last count, is fluent in over twenty programming languages. Scott's love of software restoration and remodeling began in college where he and his team were responsible for retrofiting the testing tools for the X-31 jet fighter. Since then, Scott has maintained a test-focused approach to his work and found the most joy in projects where an existing codebase needed to be improved. Scott is also a guest lecturer on Continuous Delivery practices at Harvard University.
Technical coaches help software developers to adopt better coding practices. The smart insight is that if you improve the code and the way it is being written, then the rest of your product and architectural goals become easier to achieve. It's easier to add new features, adopt new technology and modernize legacy code. Technical coaches encourage and teach skills like Test-Driven Development, Refactoring and the use of Design Patterns. Recently many of us have also been coaching developers to use AI tools better.
Technical coaching is a career where you get to stay very close to the code but your main contribution is through facilitating, mentoring and teaching, rather than writing production code or tests directly. Even if it's not the perfect career for you personally, mentoring is a useful skill for any senior developer. Plus, we all have a lot to learn about the new AI tools that are sweeping into our industry at the moment. I predict technical coaching will become an important part of technology adoption strategy in all kinds of organizations.
In this talk you will learn about how a technical coaching career can work, what skills you need, challenges you could expect and where you can get help and support on your journey.
Emily Bache Samman Technical Coach, Bache Consulting
Emily Bache is an independent consultant, YouTuber and Technical Coach. She works with developers, training and coaching effective agile practices like Refactoring and Test-Driven Development. Emily has written two books about software development and contributed to several others. Emily founded the Samman Technical Coaching Society in order to promote technical excellence and support coaches everywhere.
Come up on stage to announce your session title with a short description and the time that the session is scheduled to happen!
First time block for sessions pitched during the pitch session.
Second time block for sessions pitched during the pitch session.
Third time block for sessions pitched during the pitch session.
As with the end of any project, let's come together to talk about what went well, what could've been better, and what should change for next time.
M. Scott Ford Software Mender | Speaker | LinkedIn Learning Instructor,
M. Scott Ford, who has been called the "Bob Vila of the internet", is a polyglot developer who, at last count, is fluent in over twenty programming languages. Scott's love of software restoration and remodeling began in college where he and his team were responsible for retrofiting the testing tools for the X-31 jet fighter. Since then, Scott has maintained a test-focused approach to his work and found the most joy in projects where an existing codebase needed to be improved. Scott is also a guest lecturer on Continuous Delivery practices at Harvard University.
Close out the event with some final networking.
Studies estimate that developers spend up to 60% of their time reading code. Yet almost no one teaches us how to do it well.
When we join a new team or inherit a legacy system, we're expected to understand it quickly, assess risk, and deliver value — often without documentation, architectural clarity, or onboarding support. The usual strategy? Open files at random. Follow method calls. Scroll. Hope something clicks. It's slow. It's cognitively exhausting. And it's risky.
In this talk, I introduce Outside-In Discovery — a practical, time-boxed method to explore unknown systems layer by layer. Instead of diving straight into classes and methods, we start from the outside: documentation, CI/CD pipelines, git history, dependency health, build stability, and runtime behavior. Only then do we progressively move inward toward architecture, hotspots, test quality, and structural weaknesses.
Through a legacy case study, you'll see how this structured approach quickly surfaces critical signals: deprecated frameworks and dependency drift, architectural inconsistencies and unclear boundaries, high test coverage but weak mutation scores, and risky hotspots combining complexity and change frequency.
Then we take it further. What happens when we augment this method with AI? Used thoughtfully, AI can accelerate discovery by reverse-engineering product backlogs from code, generating C4 architecture diagrams, tracing end-to-end feature flows, and highlighting code smells and design violations. But AI can also hallucinate, over-assume, and misinterpret business intent. I'll show where it adds leverage — and where human judgment remains essential.
You'll leave with a repeatable 1-hour discovery checklist, a framework to assess the real health of any codebase, practical prompts to use AI as a sparring partner, and clear signals to prioritize safe, impactful change. Because legacy code isn't the real challenge. Unstructured exploration is.
Yoan Thirion Agile Technical Coach, Pyxis Suisse
Yoan Thirion is an agile technical coach and software crafter with 15 years of experience in software development, working for Pyxis Suisse. His different experiences in startups, small software companies, and in the service industry led him to code on a wide range of platforms and languages: mobile app development on the ancestors of our smartphones (J2ME, RIM, Windows Mobile, …), .NET stack (C#, F#, C++), PHP, Java stack (Java, Kotlin, Scala), SPA (Angular mainly). He started coaching about five years ago when he realized that he liked helping other developers and learning every day. He is an enthusiast who is always eager to learn and share with others.
Technical debt rarely appears overnight. It accumulates quietly — one quick patch, one rushed release, one temporary workaround at a time. At first, everything works. Then deployments slow down, bugs become harder to trace, and seemingly small changes begin to break unrelated parts of the system.
This talk explores how technical debt grows inside long-lived systems and why many teams underestimate its impact until reliability and productivity start to suffer.
Through real-world engineering examples, we'll examine common sources of hidden technical debt — such as tightly coupled modules, outdated dependencies, fragile database queries, and undocumented behavior. We'll also discuss practical strategies teams can use to identify, prioritize, and gradually reduce technical debt without disrupting production systems.
Attendees will leave with a framework for recognizing the warning signs of technical debt and practical approaches for transforming "quick fixes" into sustainable engineering improvements. Because maintaining software isn't just about fixing bugs — it's about ensuring systems remain healthy enough to evolve.
Bhaskar Bharat Sawant Lead Engineer & Solutions Architect, Cornerstone Building Brands
Bhaskar Bharat Sawant is a Senior Software Engineer and international conference speaker who specializes in modernizing and maintaining large-scale production systems. He works extensively with enterprise platforms where legacy code, complex databases, and evolving architectures must coexist with modern cloud and AI technologies. In his day-to-day work, Bhaskar focuses on improving system reliability, reducing technical debt, and building automation that helps engineering teams manage long-lived software systems more effectively. His experience spans database-heavy applications, DevOps automation, platform engineering, and production observability. Bhaskar is an active contributor to the global developer community and regularly speaks at international conferences on topics including AI-assisted engineering, legacy system modernization, DevSecOps automation, and scalable backend architectures.
AI coding agents feel like magic... right up until they collide with production code. For teams maintaining legacy systems, these agents often hallucinate APIs, run off on tangents, and shatter trust faster than an unreviewed hotfix at 5pm. Ignoring the past won't save us, because new code becomes old!
We can do better, and we will. In this session we'll go over emerging strategies for improving the accuracy of coding agents on real codebases, benchmarks such as SWE-bench that evaluate our progress, and their limitations. Expect to walk away with actionable techniques and a renewed respect for code that came before us and the challenges ahead.
Ray Myers Chief Architect, OpenHands
Ray Myers is a legacy code expert with 19 years of Software Engineering experience across four industries. His recent work explores the delicate intersection of AI and maintainability. He co-hosts the Empathy In Tech podcast and publishes guidance on the Craft vs Cruft YouTube channel with influences from DevOps to Taoism.