Don't be afraid to hire junior engineers, you can learn from them
This talk is not about Gen AI, even though it involves some. It is about mindset, curiosity, and asking questions. A lot of questions.
With 5 senior engineers in the team and a backlog full for the next 6 months, the excitement about our latest hire was divided. The fact that they were straight from an apprenticeship and had no coding experience did not help. We were sure that we wanted them in the team, just did not want the work that comes with tutoring an aspiring engineer.
Little did we know that our junior in 2 sprints time will pick up the story points of a senior engineer. Yes, also some deleted databases along the way, but that is part of the game.
Why I run in my meetings 🏃♀️
Do you have too many meetings? Do you find yourself reading chat messages, emails, or quickly looking something up while in a meeting? What was the meeting actually about?
I also did that, all of it, until I started running.
The preparation, the focus, and the active listening that is required to run while in a meeting are something different. Let me show you how it worked for me. It might help you as well.
Modernizing a Traditional Bank with Open Source: Yes, it is possible
This session shares insights from a modernization initiative in a traditional banking environment, focusing on how open source technologies were introduced while maintaining strong operational and regulatory controls.
The learnings cover platform design, governance models, operational safeguards, and collaboration between infrastructure teams and banking stakeholders. The focus remains on to how modernization efforts can be structured to reduce risk while gradually introducing new engineering practices. Traditional banking is not exactly a synonym for flexibility.
The talk aims to shed light on a real-life use case, including lessons learned and considerations that other financial institutions may encounter when adopting open source technologies.
Operating Digital Asset Platforms on Open Infrastructure: Lessons from Regulated Production
Digital asset platforms operate under demanding conditions: strict security requirements, high availability expectations, and increasing regulatory scrutiny. At the same time, engineering teams must retain the flexibility to evolve their systems as the digital asset ecosystem continues to develop.
This session explores lessons learned from supporting the operation of a regulated digital asset platform built on cloud-native and open source technologies. The talk outlines architectural patterns, operational practices, and governance approaches that enable financial-grade infrastructure while maintaining transparency and control.
This real-life use case highlights what worked for us and what didn't.
A guided tour through our digitally sovereign ecosystem🇨🇭
Sovereignty can be built from open source up.
This session will give you an in-depth view of how we built a collaborative network of sovereign managed service providers, cloud providers, software vendors, and implementation partners - working together to deliver managed applications free from vendor lock-in. All that based on cloud native and open source technology like Crossplane and Helm.
From idea to action, including all the challenges in between, from which there have been plenty of.
We will open the curtains and let you in our decision process about architecture and technology. Most importantly, we will show you that it is possible.
How we used Crossplane for the things we should not have
Frameworks are meant to be tweaked, that is just a part of being an engineer. Even if a new cloud native, open source framework is exactly what you are attempting to build.
This talk tells the story of what Crossplane is and what we wanted it to be. It highlights the need for the emerging Crossplane V2, and why they are different. It also illustrates a real life story when bending leads to breaking, with losing 230 production databases for a customer during maintenance. The silver lining - we kept the customer, but changed our approach.
KCD Istanbul 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
Open Source in Finance Forum London 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
KCD Czech & Slovak 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
Swiss Cloud Native Day 2025 Sessionize Event
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top