the builder’s era
This year’s theme—The Builders Era—celebrates the people behind the progress: the makers, maintainers, mentors, and leaders redefining what it means to ship responsibly in the age of AI.
Deep dives, demos, and technical sessions from the creators shaping modern workflows.
Learn how AI, DevEx, and craftsmanship are redefining the way developers build.
The biggest productivity gains from AI don’t come from individual developers using AI—they come when entire teams share context and eliminate handoffs. This session shows how Zapier’s engineering, product, and design teams use AI to blur traditional role boundaries, make faster decisions, and ship features that are actually informed by customer data patterns.
SPEAKERS
Chris Geoghegan, VP Product at Zapier
Today’s AI can win the IMO, but it can’t answer your customer complaints. It lacks the intuition, the nuance, the insight, the lessons hard-won over your career. The key bottleneck to reliable enterprise intelligence is your expert supervision — the question is, how do you scale it?
SPEAKERS
Leonard Tang, CEO at Haize Labs
Engineers are caught in the new metrics crossfire: exec dashboards, AI hype, and real human output. This panel brings together engineering leads, VPs, and senior devs to explore what actually matters when teams are being measured, and how to manage up without selling your soul.
SPEAKERS
Jordan Wallet, Engineering Lead at GitKraken
Anastasia Zamyshlyaeva, VP of Engineering at GitKraken
Brittany Ellich, VP of Engineering at GitKraken
Think you know Git? Think once more! This session reveals underrated Git commands that save time, reduce pain, and make you look way smarter in a pinch.
SPEAKERS
Jonathan Silva, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at GitKraken
The rise of AI is transforming not just how we code — but how we grow. In this candid discussion, developer leaders and educators Leon Noel, Quincy Larson, Dmitry Fonarev, and Danny Thompson explore how developers at any stage can intentionally craft their careers amid rapid technological change. From building essential soft and technical skills, to recognizing when to step into leadership, to understanding what hiring managers look for in an AI-shaped world.
Whether you’re a junior developer, a seasoned engineer, or a team lead navigating the shift to AI-powered workflows, you’ll leave with tangible insights to take the next step in your journey.
SPEAKERS
Danny Thompson, Director Of Technology at DThompsonDev
Leon Noel, Managing Director, Engineering at Resilient Coders & 100Devs
Nathen Harvey from Google’s DORA team shares groundbreaking research on how AI is genuinely transforming software development practices. Learn about the new DORA AI Capabilities Model and discover evidence-based approaches to measuring and improving AI’s impact on your team’s performance. This is the data that cuts through the noise.
SPEAKERS
Nathen Harvey, DORA Lead at Google Cloud
Every era of software has reshaped what leadership means. Let’s talk about how to lead in the AI era, with frameworks for measuring impact, scaling innovation, and building teams that move as fast as technology evolves.
SPEAKERS
Tracy Lee, CEO at This Dot Labs
Moving from theory to practice, Jeremy walks through proven frameworks for quantifying AI’s impact on your engineering organization. Drawing from GitKraken’s “Quantifying the Impact of AI” research, you’ll learn which metrics matter, how to establish baselines, and how to communicate AI value to stakeholders. Leave with a practical measurement approach you can implement immediately.
SPEAKERS
Jeremy Castile, VP of Developer Research at GitKraken
Every engineering leader is saying the same thing: “Adopt AI, or get left behind.” That pressure has created two extremes: over reliance, resistance, and a heap of bad code. In this talk, Rizel Scarlett explores how engineering leaders can help their teams build rituals that encourage discernment over dependency and guide engineers to ship smarter instead of just faster.
SPEAKERS
Rizel Scarlett, Tech Lead, Open Source Developer Relations at Block, Inc.
As AI reshapes how code moves from commit to deploy, identifying and fixing delivery bottlenecks before they compound can prove challenging. This session explores how to connect high-level performance indicators to the day-to-day developer workflows that drive them. From first response time to post-merge rework, learn how using DORA and PR metrics helps build more predictable delivery systems.
SPEAKERS
Jeff Schinella, Senior Product Director at GitKraken
Developer experience isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s a leading indicator of productivity, retention, and innovation. This session shares the latest insights from developer surveys and research, revealing what truly impacts developer satisfaction and how engineering leaders can systematically improve DevEx across their organizations.
SPEAKERS
Jeremy Castile, VP of Developer Research at GitKraken
AI tools and agents are spreading across the SDLC, but are they actually improving developer experience or just adding noise? Join Nathen Harvey (Google), Bill Harding (GitClear), and Jeremy Castile (GitKraken) – moderated by Najla Elmachtoub (Squadformers) – as they cut through the hype to discuss what’s really working, where AI can make the biggest impact beyond code generation, how to measure what matters, and how to connect developer experience improvements to business outcomes your executives care about.
SPEAKERS
Jeremy Castile, VP of Developer Research at GitKraken
Nathen Harvey, DORA Lead at Google Cloud
Bill Harding, CEO/Programmer at
GitClear
Najla Elmachtoub, Director of Engineering at
Squadformers
Brittany Ellich
We’re looking for games that turn Git’s most notorious pain points into engaging mechanics. Merge conflicts as puzzle levels. Commit history as a time-travel adventure. You get the idea.
Or maybe you’ve built something that prevents those pain points entirely. A tool that makes other developers say, “Where has this been my whole career?”
See the full details and submit your 5-minute demo video by November 26th to win.
How to enter
GITKON 2025 | THE BUILDER’S ERA
Hosted by GitKraken — the DevEx platform trusted by 40M+ developers & 100K organizations
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