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.
This session breaks down how we’re embedding AI into GitKraken Desktop and GitLens to actually reduce Git friction (not add more tabs, clicks, or guesswork). From smarter commits to conflict resolution, we’ll unpack the thinking behind what we’ve shipped and where we’re headed next.
SPEAKERS
Justin Roberts, Sr. Director of Product at GitKraken
GitKraken MCP gives AI agents the repo context they’ve been missing, unlocking faster and smarter Git workflows right now. We’ll dig into how MCPs are evolving and why they’re poised to become a foundational layer of tomorrow’s developer tools.
SPEAKERS
Eric Amodio, CTO at GitKraken
Melese Michael, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at GitKraken
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, Senior Software Engineer at GitHub
Marino Wijay, Staff Solutions Architect at Kong Inc.
Dillon Mulroy, Principal Engineer at Cloudflare
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
Go beyond the commit with advanced GitKraken workflows designed to streamline how you ship. From AI-generated commits and PRs to conflict resolution, worktrees, and clean history management, this session delivers practical Git mastery for real-world projects.
SPEAKERS
Kevin Bost, Sr. Senior Software Architect at IntelliTect
AI coding assistants are great at completing small tasks or features. However, what do you do when you are working with more complex code bases, and you need to build in-depth features that need upfront planning?
This talk explores spec-driven development as a solution to this problem. I’ll show you how modern AI coding assistants (like Kiro) can help break down complex tasks into three distinct phases. We’ll look at the real-world tradeoffs of this approach, and most importantly and how you can use it in your own projects right away.
Game developers ship fast, but traditional security scanning breaks their flow with manual reviews and enterprise processes built for IT teams, not creative studios. This session shows how we built tooling that removes security as a blocker. Using the Maester framework and GitHub Actions, we created an automated system that runs 49 identity security checks across all our Entra ID tenants without developers leaving their workflow. We integrated scanning directly into GitHub Actions, built custom PowerShell scripts for gaming environments, and automated real-time compliance monitoring. The result: 100% adoption, faster shipping, and zero security incidents. Learn how we turned enterprise security requirements into developer-friendly automation that protects critical game assets without compromising velocity.
SPEAKERS
Audrey Long, Sr. Gaming Cloud Security Architect at Microsoft
As teams increasingly rely on GenAI for code, configurations, and entire feature slices, traditional testing pipelines are buckling under the surge of changes.
Traditional CI/CD pipelines quickly become a bottleneck, slowing releases and hindering velocity gains.
This talk explores what it takes to stay ahead of quality issues in an AI-accelerated world. We’ll look at how to modernize your quality gates, redesign your testing strategy, and build pipelines that scale with AI-generated output. You’ll learn a holistic approach that shifts testing both left and right, integrates quality signals throughout the delivery process, and supports teams aiming to maintain (or increase) velocity all the way into production.
SPEAKERS
Ole Lensmar, CTO at Testkube
The votes are in. The finalists have been decided. Now it’s time to reveal who turned Git into gameplay.
Join us as we showcase the top three projects from the GitKon 2025 Game Jam and announce the grand prize winner. Watch demos of games and developer tools that made merge conflicts fun, rebasing playable, and version control actually entertaining. See what happens when developers get creative with Git workflows, and find out who’s taking home $2500, $1000 & $500.
GitKraken 2025 Wrapped is your catch-up on the biggest updates we shipped this year across GitLens, GitKraken Desktop, and more. We’ll cover the standout releases like GitKraken MCP and Commit Composer, and give a preview of what’s coming next.
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.
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
In this session we’ll dive deep into what context matters, how to plan and implement with precision, and how to combine subagents to bring it all together. What better way to learn how to get the most out of a coding agent than by dissecting how they work under the hood?
SPEAKERS
Chris Kelly, Product (Developer Productivity & AI) at Augment
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
Take a trip back through 2025 and see how GitKraken tools are helping engineering leaders drive team success. Catch up on big changes in Automations, AI security controls, Insights, and more. Plus see what we’re working on next.
SPEAKERS
Jeff Schinella, Senior Product Director at GitKraken
How to enter
GITKON 2025 | THE BUILDER’S ERA
Hosted by GitKraken — the DevEx platform trusted by 40M+ developers & 100K organizations
X
Panel: Your Boss is Measuring You, Now What?
Panel: Your Boss is Measuring You, Now What?
Inside GitKraken AI: What We’re Building (and What We’re Not)
Panel: Your Boss is Measuring You, Now What?
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vivamus auctor enim lacus, accumsan condimentum velit tristique vitae. Proin eleifend elementum dui ac interdum. Aenean quis risus ut turpis mattis dignissim. Nam in purus interdum, ullamcorper lacus quis, porta urna. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vivamus auctor enim lacus, accumsan condimentum velit tristique vitae. Proin eleifend elementum dui ac interdum. Aenean quis risus ut turpis mattis dignissim. Nam in purus interdum, ullamcorper lacus quis, porta urna.