Makan Sepehrifar
Staff Engineer at Productboard
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Actions
Makan Sepehrifar is a software architect whose fascination with the intricacies of organizational behavior and cognitive psychology has led him to redefine the way technology interfaces with human understanding. Looking at software architecture as a craftsmanship process, he realized that the more abstract you look at it, the more complexities arises. His career has been a testament to his commitment to bridging the gap between technology and human behaviour, resulting in innovative software solutions that not only work efficiently but also self-adaptive teams that embrace the mindset of agile.
Links
Area of Expertise
Topics
Who to blame? The AI, The Programmer, or The Prompt?
This interactive session transforms AI security education into an engaging courtroom style debate. We'll present five critical vulnerabilities affecting modern AI development tools, and after each case study, the audience becomes the jury—voting on who's responsible: the careless user, the negligent developer, or the inadequate service provider.
We'll dissect real CVEs including GitHub Camo Leak (CVE-2025-59145), Ollama RCE (CVE-2024-37032), AWS MCP Server Shell Injection (CVE-2025-5277), Anthropic MCP Inspector DNS Rebinding (CVE-2025-49596 ) and Microsoft Copilot's zero-click data exfiltration (CVE-2025-32711). Each case reveals technical root causes through collaborative analysis.
The conclusion challenges the "blame game" itself: these vulnerabilities expose fundamental architectural weaknesses in agentic AI systems where traditional security models fail. We'll establish that securing AI tools demands a shared responsibility framework developers must code defensively, providers must architect securely, and users must understand AI-specific risks.
Making the tests that Matter
Your agent just said "All tests pass." Ship it?
Not so fast. When one agent writes the code, the tests and the verdict, what is left to rely on? Green is the agent's finish line, not a go-ahead, and certainly not proof.
Coverage can't tell you much, since agents hit any coverage target without checking anything. Mutation score can, because it asks whether your tests catch faults injected on purpose. The tests that catch them are specification tests: written from the requirements, not from the code, they say what the software must do, whoever writes the implementation.
Then you'll see how to have tests written by an agent that has never seen the code, and how to keep them Readable, Enforced and Durable through every rewrite.
Live, in a Java project, you'll watch a coding agent try to weaken its own tests to reach green, and watch the guards stop it.
- Write specification tests from the requirements, separate from the scaffolding tests agents write for themselves.
- Measure test quality with mutation score**, not coverage, and spot tests that can never fail.
- Stop agents from weakening, skipping or deleting the tests they're judged by.
- Set up the skills, hooks and CI gates that keep tests trustworthy.
Falling in Love with Platform Engineering: The CUPID Way
In recent years, large organizations have adopted Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) to balance governance and autonomy. Despite their promise, many platforms prioritize compliance over usability. This talk explores enhancing platform engineering through principles like product mindset, user experience, and key metrics, while questioning the optimal granularity of services in the “Golden Path.”
Inspired by Dan North’s “Joyful Software”, during this talk the concept of “Joyful Engineering” and the CUPID principles are proposed to transform service building approaches. By focusing on self-containment, idempotency and single purpose, organizations can improve service acceptance and foster collaboration.
Key takeaways include:
- Understanding why IDPs aren’t a magic solution for developer experience.
- Finding the balance between autonomy and governance.
- Adoption of Cupid Principles (Composable, Unix Philosophy, Predictable, Idiomatic, Domain-based) to Platform Engineering.
- Leveraging the “Everything as Code” mindset with Agentic AI to shape the future of developer experience.
Developer Experience : From Hype to Reality
The term “developer experience” (DevEx) emerged in the early 2010s as a response to the growing importance of developer communities in the tech industry, ensuring happy and productive developers through a seamless experience. While numerous theoretical guidelines exist for DevEX, this talk focuses on practical implementation and case studies. Drawing from our own experiences in large organizations like Rabobank & Bol.com, we explore diverse approaches to fostering a DevEx culture. We will show how different high-level incentives behind DevEx Culture adoption, change the strategies of big and mid-size orgs toward the implementation.
Takeaways:
- Understanding the relation between Developer Experience (DX) and Platform Engineering.
- Learned lessons from real-world examples of large/mid-sized companies.
- Practical tips on what services can bring more value for your company
- Best measurements to help your company to weight their success in developer experience and platform engineering
Capability Mesh: Architecture for the Agentic Era
Ten years ago, microservices chaos led to "Service Mesh" solving the discoverability problem by replacing network endpoints with meaningful references, enabling scalability and observability. It worked brilliantly for connecting services. Today we're living through the same cycle with Generative AI and Agents, but the chaos is about integration, not networking. The old problems discoverability, scalability, observability are back because orchestrators now pick agents by capability, not name. Plus we face new challenges: explainability of agent actions and the possibility of unintended actions due to the non-deterministic nature of large language models. We need the same evolutionary leap from "Service Mesh" to "Capability Mesh" shifting from technical service contracts to semantic capability integration for autonomous AI.
Key Topics and Take Aways:
- From OpenAPI to MCP: The Protocol Shift in Agentic AI
- Capability Hierarchies: Composing Agents at Scale
- Human-on-the-Loop: Redefining Our Role in Agent Systems
- Policy as Code: Governing Autonomous Agents
- Observability & Safety: Tracing Agent Behavior
Platmosphere | Chapter 2026: Master the Vibe Sessionize Event
Dutch AI Conference 2026 Sessionize Event
Makan Sepehrifar
Staff Engineer at Productboard
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Links
Actions
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