The Magic of Beginnings

There's some kind of special magic that occurs with a first year conference. Like-minded people gather to discuss and explore a topic that everyone knows is at its very beginnings. And in that gathering, the spark of a new community is lit.

We've seen this before with our previous conferences, and, even though SW2con is a reboot of what we were doing with GlueCon, you can see this already starting to happen again. This is one of the most gratifying moments in starting a new event, and I think that those who have been to our past conferences can testify to just how powerful (and influential) this early community's reach can become.

With all of that in mind, I wanted to post something about the sessions we're still looking for with regards to the agenda. Even though you might see some placeholder topics on the agenda, I've actually only placed 30% of the sessions. These are, largely, the sessions that you see with a person's name associated with a session title.

These include keynotes like:

-The Past, Present and Future of Vector Databases - Jonathan Ellis, CTO, DataStax

-2024: Retooling, Reskilling, Rebranding - KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, Senior Industry Analyst, Kate Holterhoff, Analyst, and Rachel Stephens, Senior Analyst - RedMonk

-An Interview with Paige Bailey, Group Product Manager GenAI Models, Google and Alex Williams of The NewStack

-How We Use Embeddings and RAG in Copilot - Mario Rodriguez, VP Product Management, GitHub

-Robots are Wasted on the Young - Paul Kedrosky, SK Ventures

-Responsible Generative AI: Understanding How to Develop Responsible Systems -- Sriram Subramanian, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

In addition, we have confirmed sessions like:

-Runtime for AI Agents

-Separating Signal From Noise: When does AI have the biggest impact on Developer productivity?

-Fact Respecting Generative AI with RAG and Check

-Building Something Real with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

-Community-Centric Approaches to Securing AI-generated Code

-Unlocking Federal Opportunities: Navigating Challenges in Federal Agency AI Adoption

-Models, Embeddings & Batches: From Pilot to Production with Enterprise GenAI

-Code AI: From Hype to Helpful

So, what am I still looking for? The answer is all of your great ideas that focus on this new wave of software development. Now, some of that will encompass WASM and APIs -- but it will also include things like:

Vector Databases

Using DPO (vs. RAG)

Synthetic Data for Model Output Restraints

Securing APIs with AI-driven Monitoring

Understanding Diffusion Models

From LangChain to LlamaIndex

Time Series Forecasting with AI models

And soooooo much more. If you have an idea, send it my way. If you know someone that should be speaking at SW2con, please urge them to submit. Experience is not a prerequisite (we love first-time presenters), just make it technical and forward looking. I'll be doing another round of "agenda placement" over the next few weeks, so now is a great time to submit (there's a contact form on the site that you can use).

As the energy and impetus for SW2con builds, our excitement is growing by the day. And I have a sneaking suspicion that something magical is going to happen in May in Colorado. Join us!