Software is a mess. Bloated, sluggish, broken by its own updates. Even basic apps demand absurd computing power. And innovation? If you count shuffling UI elements or slapping a ChatGPT button onto everything, sure.

The common explanation is that engineers got lazy or companies got greedy. The real explanation is simpler: we keep destroying context. Technical debt is lost context. Bloat is unknown context. Wrong features are guessed context. Reorgs are destroyed context. Every horror story in IT, from Sonos shipping a 1.2-star app to Southwest Airlines running on Windows 3.1, traces back to the same failure: context that was never made explicit, got buried, or was actively destroyed.

This talk walks through the wreckage with real cases, leaked whistleblower reports, and research data, then presents practical fixes organized by what you can actually control: your own workflows, your AI tools, your team's practices, and your organization's incentives. Your project doesn't have to follow the Googles and Metas down the enshittification curve.

Let's figure out how to build good software again.

This talk is an entertaining rant with a serious thesis underneath. The first half is real failure cases (Sonos whistleblower data, CrowdStrike/Southwest, LastPass breach timeline) that get the audience laughing and nodding. The second half reframes every example through "context degradation" as a unifying theory and delivers concrete fixes. Profanity is part of the register. Five deliveries so far including JavaLand, JCON, and Voxxed Days; this is the mature version.