Daniel Schley’s Post

A few days have passed since #WWC26, and I've finally had a chance to reflect on an incredible week. It was my first time at #WeAreDevelopers and I experienced the conference from three different perspectives: 🎧 Visitor: Despite my moderation duty on two stages for two full afternoons I had the chance to learn from inspiring talks (e.g. by Justin Reock), discover new ideas, and have several conversations with engineers and leaders from around the world. 🎤 Moderator: Introducing speakers, warming up the audience (and myself before my own talk!), and facilitating Q&A was a fantastic experience. It also gave me the opportunity to listen to talks from Matthias Niehoff, Jordan Tigani , Mattias Jonsson & Daniël van Eeden, Celeste Horgan, Hartmut Armbruster, Juraci Paixão Kröhling, Uwe Leo Korn, Martin Sakowski & Martin Karrer, Adam Bird, Phil Leggetter, ⛷️ Ben Smith and Jeremy M.. 🎙️ Speaker: Probably the most rewarding experience. Presenting "Blameless Postmortems That Change Nothing: Cultural Anti-Patterns in Incident Learning" and discussing why well-intentioned incident reviews often fail to create meaningful organizational change sparked some fantastic conversations long after the session ended. One thing that stood out throughout the conference was how often conversations returned to the same themes: engineering culture, organizational learning, and the impact AI is having on the way we build software. AI is accelerating software development, but it also makes effective learning loops and healthy engineering cultures even more important. Improve your system! A huge thank you to everyone who attended my talk, asked thoughtful questions during and after the talk, or waited to chat with me and exchange on the topic. Those hallway conversations are often just as valuable as the sessions themselves. Looking back, this wasn't just my first #WeAreDevelopers it was also my first time speaking at an international conference. I couldn't have asked for a better experience, and I'm already looking forward to the next one. #WeAreDevs #WWC26 #WeAreDevelopers #EngineeringLeadership #SoftwareEngineering #IncidentManagement #LearningCulture #AI