What to see at Oredev 2026

Underjord is an artisanal consultancy doing consulting in Elixir, Nerves with an accidental speciality in marketing and outreach. If you like the writing you should really try the pro version.

Oredev is an awesome conference I really enjoy. This will be my fourth year. I have had the fortune of going as a speaker and every year I sift through the probably very nice Java and .Net talks for stuff that suits me. And there are always some real gems.

Total transparency, I am a media partner for the conference, which lets me make videos like this one where I bother their sponsors about whether they use Elixir. I promise it hurt more for me than it hurts to watch and I think it actually turned out quite nicely. And we got a really nice push for functional programming as a prospective new theme.

I still don’t know what I did right for my first Oredev talk. It is the most viewed video or talk I’ve ever made I think. Also their biggest video ever last I checked. But I’ve come back for more talks. This year I’ll be trying to show people just what it is about our runtime that is so special. BEAM talk in other words.

Okay. Recommendations and picks.

I’ll be picking slots per day from the schedule, so many will be excluded because they collide, you might make different choices. If you work in Java or .Net your have so much more stuff to pile on that the value proposition for your employer is frankly ridiculous.

Day 1

AI. .Net MAUI. AI. SRE. Offline first. Amber? Intent? I like the titling of Computers in Amber. Wait. The MAUI talk is a Bluetooth Emulator. So suddenly it is of more interest to me. I’ll go with Offline-First.o

Offline-First at 35k Feet by Andrew Lombardi

Local-first. Okay. Java .. nah. CLIs. Okay. AI. Lots of AI. Software DNA.

Hmm. I’m split between two AI talks. The Great Brain Robbery: Navigating the Dark Future of Online Manipulation by Jeff Watkins and Mapping Biases to Testing in the LLM era by Maaike Brinkhof.

Then.. I’m busy giving Can your system do this? and I was going to suggest what talk you can go to while I do that. But of course I’d prefer if you went to mine. Frankly I have some seriously good competition. I met Sergès Goma last year and this talk, Developers in the Dark Forest about what has happened to our public spaces online seems quite interesting. And then I’m a sucker for someone who reps a handle and the topic is good: Let’s meet at the intersection of art and technology by bleeptrack.

This one is tricky. Three Disasters That Started With “We Don’t Need to Test That” by Christine Pinto seems like it could be a lot of fun. Prompt Injection is the new SQL Injection by Linus Kvarnhammar would be a good recalibration. A few other AI talks I think looked very reasonable. I’m constantly going back and forth between being interested in and sick of the topic.

Next up Thinking Outside the Box: Alternative Architectures for Modern Web Applications by Matheus Albuquerque. Topic seems cool. Title is brutally long. Actually. That’s a theme. I’m glad I managed to stick to no subtitle. We’ll see if it pays off..

Not sure if the Death Star is a good case study but I like the premise of A Rebel Scum Guide to Threat Modelling by Saskia Coplans. This talk by Vernon Richards seems quite interesting, the perspective of testers, a role I barely see or hear about anymore but I’m sure is still relatively common at larger shops and that would definitely be hit even worse by LLMs. I think I might go for Building collaborative text editors with Yjs by Bartosz Sypytkowski though because I really like that stuff.

Day 2

A talk about using AI with Figma to make a self-service UX framework does sound cool. The title is ominous. No researchers were harmed in the making of this test suite by Dora Makszy. The Reinvention of the Dev Team by Hannah Foxwell covers related ground and also seems interesting.

Oh this is fun. Using Glassdoor reviews for incident forecasting. Your company is dysfunctional and employees unhappy, brace yourselves. Your Culture is Leaking Data: Forecasting Cyber Attacks with Glassdoor Reviews. There is a talk on vector search and embeddings by Alan Smith, a topic I find endlessly fascinating. I might need to go to Taking cloud-native offline though since I certainly have prospective NervesCloud customers that cannot be on the public cloud.

An overview off data engines (in Python) by Mimoune Djouallah seems tempting.

I am frequently impressed and fascinated by DevOps type talks and The Evolution of GitOps in Platform Engineering by Artem Lajko seems very interesting. But then I saw Solving supply chain issues with structured vetting by David Mellum and I really enjoyed chatting with David last year and his talk on Rust web dev I remember as being quite good. Very friendly and intimidatingly smart kind of person. And this talk seems to aim squarely at a hard problem intersecting tech and people, tackling things that I currently see people worry about.

“Does this spark joy?” is what I really want to be asking about parts of my repos. This topic could be hit or miss but I’m tempted to try Organizing, Decluttering, Dan-Sha-Ri - Order Trends for Repositories by Milena F.

The good, the bad and the ugly of the engineering mindset by Allan Kelly seems like it could be good/painful.

Brain interfaces is a hell of a topic. And I think I’d like to hear it. Alex Casson gives that one.

Oh, every day has a keynote. I guess I’m just disregarding those in this post since your choice is fish.

Day 3

Can’t go wrong with knowing more new Web APIs. I’m barely a web developer at the moment. I’m starting to earn an ex-web-dev status and I’d rather refresh my membership occasionally. So Web APIs You Should Be Using in 2026: Unlocking Next-Level Web Experiences might be in order. Given by Lucky Nkosi.

As an Erlang Ecosystem Foundation board member I feel kind of obligated to stay up to date on the CRA. CRAcking Compliance - The EU Cyber Resilience Act by Christian Schabetsberger seems like a good choice.

Weaving Code and Knitting Circuits - Current Research and Challenges within E-Textiles by Becky Stewart sounds fantastic! It is going head to head in my mind with End-to-End Encryption Demystified by Martin Gunnarsson. I’d enjoy the encryption talk but I already know way more about that than E-Textiles.

The honest look (as Claude would say) at The Real Costs of Using AI by Artem Lajko maybe? Actually the last slot has a bunch of bangers. Enshittification-Resistant by Design: PWAs, Local-First Data, and the Open Web by Kristoffer Fredriksson seem like another good pick.

And then ending on a Kevlin Henney keynote which should be good.

In closing

There is a lot in there. If you want to go all AI, or zero AI, there are talks for every slot. In my experience I can never quite summon the focus to see a talk in every slot and also I have to record some stuff and so on. But this is a good outline. I’d enjoy this. And I’m sure I’ll meet some of these people and realize I want to hear their talk instead of the one I had planned. Conferences are dynamic things.

Oredev is always a lovely conference. I can recommend asking your employer to send you, shortly after you get back from Goatmire.

Thanks for reading. Hope to see you at the events.

Underjord is an artisanal consultancy doing consulting in Elixir, Nerves with an accidental speciality in marketing and outreach. If you like the writing you should really try the pro version.

Note: Or try the videos on the YouTube channel.