Brendan O'Leary
Developer Relations at Kilo Code
Annapolis, Maryland, United States
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Brendan O'Leary is a Developer Relations Engineer at Kilo Code (kilocode.ai), on a mission to help people leverage AI effectively in their workflows, and is an advisor to various startups. Having worked in software his entire career, Brendan has had the privilege of working with many customers. Previously at Prefect, GitLab and a board member of the CNCF – it is clear, every company is a software company. That means every company needs software and AI operational excellence. Outside of work, you'll find Brendan with 1 to 4 kids hanging off of him at any given time or occasionally finding a moment alone to build something in his workshop.
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From Vibe Coding to Vibe Engineering
The first wave of AI coding assistants either produced unreliable code or offered limited functionality as glorified autocomplete tools. Meanwhile, developers faced fragmentation across dozens of tools, each with their own strengths but forcing painful workflow changes. And it seems like recently we’ve been hearing about the opposite: the demise of the software engineer and the rise of the “vibe coder”
This talk examines this evolution through the lens of modern AI coding tools like Kilo Code. We’ll explore how specialized AI modes now support different phases of the engineering process: architectural planning before writing code, understanding complex codebases, and sophisticated debugging of existing systems. Through demonstrations, you’ll see how approval-based workflows maintain developer control while dramatically enhancing productivity.
The most profound insight isn’t about the tools themselves, but how they’re changing what development means. As raw coding ability becomes less critical, other skills rise in importance: system design, problem framing, evaluation, and contextual knowledge. The future belongs not to developers who can be replaced by AI, but to those who master this collaborative dance between human creativity and machine capability.
By the end of this session, you’ll understand how to integrate AI coding tools into your existing workflow to transform your development process without sacrificing control or quality - and why the future belongs not to vibe coding, but to true vibe engineering.
From COBOL to Claude: What Hopper Knew
The most dangerous phrase in the English language is ‘We’ve always done it that way.’” Grace Hopper spent 60 years fighting this mentality. Today’s developers sneering at “AI slop” and rolling their eyes at “vibe coding” are repeating history—the same engineers who said COBOL would never catch on. You’re about to find out why Amazing Grace wouldn’t hire them—and why you shouldn’t either.
In fact, every time you prompt Claude to write code, you’re witnessing the future Grace Hopper predicted in 1955 and throughout her career. Admiral Hopper carried 11.8-inch wires to make nanoseconds tangible. Today, she’d carry LEGO bricks to explain how AI transforms thoughts into code at light speed.
The progression is clear:
Punch cards → Assembly → COBOL → Modern frameworks → Natural language
We’ve reached Hopper’s vision: human language as the primary computer interface.
The imperative to stop being lazy and do better
There are a lot of challenging, unsolved problems in software. Building accessible, inclusive, smart software is a solved one...do better.
My last name is valid. Despite what countless apps and websites have tried to tell me over the previous few decades, it is reasonable to have an apostrophe in a name. I get it; SQL can be hard. Many "solve" this problem through form validation, saying, "Please enter a valid last name." Talk about *invalidating* someone's experience in life.
And that's not even that big of a deal. I've learned to live with it. My father doesn't even try to enter the apostrophe anymore. But this kind of carelessness is all too common in tech. Many other people's identities are marginalized even more severely when developers add forms with "gender" questions that contain no sensitivity to folks with diverse gender identities. Putting "other" doesn't make your form inclusive...it makes it worse. The internet and technology were supposed to be the great equalizer - everyone's ability to contribute, have their voices heard and participate. Yet, we struggle to this day, making our applications fully accessible to those who are differently-abled than us. And a lack of tech diversity can lead to further marginalizing people of color and other minority groups.
We can and must do better. In this talk, we'll examine examples of each of these types of inclusion. And then, we'll show how these issues have already been solved; it just requires the determination and compassion to choose to make our products more accessible and more inclusive.
The Asynchronous Enterprise
The one question I'm asked more than any other when talking about working at GitLab is: wait, you don't have any offices? That is often followed by a confused look or the direct question: How?
Writing down decisions, asynchronous communication, measuring results, not hours. Companies often aspire to these goals...however in an all-remote company, they aren't aspirational - they are requirements. GitLab has grown from 9 people in 2014 to over 900 people in 55 different countries with a valuation of almost $3 billion.
In this talk, we'll discover some of the not-so-secret sauce that GitLab has leveraged to achieve this growth. On this journey, our values have remained the same. We value collaboration, results, efficiency, diversity & inclusion, iteration, and transparency. And we've done all that without having any office, headquarters, or anything that looks like one.
Shakespeare, Bacon, and the NSA
A code-breaking Quaker poet from Indiana who hunted Nazi spies? All right, that sounds like some sort of comic-book superhero. And what is this superhero's origin story? Oh, they just were plucked from a library in Chicago to the secretive lair of an eccentric billionaire to study a secret code in the writings of Shakespeare that talks of a hidden heir to the English crown? Now it *must* be the latest in a series of multiverse-based superhero movies, right?
As always, truth is stranger than fiction, and this is the actual life of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, who had a hand in not only breaking codes during both World Wars but, along with her husband, is credited as a founder of modern cryptology. Elizebeth's extraordinary life can serve as a lesson to all of us about what it takes to change the world. Even a poet can end up founding a science that today backs the entirety of technology and inspire some of the most sophisticated government agencies ever conceived of by humanity.
In this talk, we'll follow Elizebeth's journey, learn the history of cryptography, and apply those lessons to how we should view technology and technologists today.
I'm not technical enough to give this talk
I don't have a computer science degree. I haven't ever been paid to write code for a living. In fact, the only programming "class" I've ever taken was a VB business school class 15 years ago.
In this talk, I'll prove that the qualifications to learn, teach, and talk about technology are not the "traditional" ones. No one should feel that their opinion or experience is less than someone who has more of a typical software engineering resume. By giving three mini-demos of technology that I have no right talking about, I'll show that being self-taught doesn't mean you shouldn't share your knowledge with others. The only requirement is a little creativity and a lot of curiosity, and anyone can stand up on stage or write a blog or teach their coworkers something new.
Failure is not an option: What Apollo 11 can teach us about DevOps
Many software development professionals think of themselves as cutting edge innovators who explore new and exciting frontiers. Contrarily, concepts that may be considered contemporary innovations are actually ideas that were conceived decades ago when humans strived to explore the REAL final frontier - space. Over fifty years ago, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon. But behind this amazing human accomplishment was the work of countless individuals who collaborated to make the impossible happen. In this talk, we’ll re-examine what we can learn from the Apollo program and how that knowledge can help avoid pitfalls today. While shipping code directly into production might be scary for you, imagine if that code was shipped into the vacuum of space and could only use 24K of storage and 1K of memory.
All I need to know about DevOps I learned from XKCD
XKCD describes itself as “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” What if it is more? What if XKCD and it’s creator Randall Munroe have slowly been revealing what software development, DevOps and team collaboration are all about.
In this talk, we’ll take a look at some recurring themes in XKCD comics - and how they hit home with recurring themes in DevOps. From regular expressions, vim vs. emacs to user experiences so bad...they are literally a joke XKCD finds ways to express simply the thoughts we’ve all had. We will examine these comics for their deeper meaning (deeper even than just the tooltip text Randall leaves behind) and learn from them how to make better software.
2023 All Day DevOps Sessionize Event
Bsides NoVa 2023 Sessionize Event
2021 All Day DevOps Sessionize Event
DeveloperWeek 2021 Sessionize Event
2020 All Day DevOps Sessionize Event
JSConf: Hawaii 2020 Sessionize Event
Brendan O'Leary
Developer Relations at Kilo Code
Annapolis, Maryland, United States
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