Segun Akinyemi
Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft
Charlotte, North Carolina, United States
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Segun Akinyemi is a Nigerian American writer, speaker, educator, and Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft known for explaining complex topics in a practical, down-to-earth way. He writes, speaks, and teaches about software engineering, applied AI, and tech careers, helping students and professionals use AI tools while keeping humans in the loop. Based in Charlotte, he founded Discovery Days, a local field trip program connecting students with STEM opportunities, created and maintains Charlotte Third Places, and was named to the 2025 Charlotte Business Journal 40 Under 40 list at age 28. Learn more at segunak.com.
Area of Expertise
Topics
The Children Yearn For the Mines: Finding Craftsmanship in AI-Assisted Software Engineering
For many of us software engineers, writing code was how we understood a system, shaped it, and found joy in our work. As AI writes more of the code, some of us feel more creative than ever, while others feel we’ve lost the very thing we entered the profession to do.
The “children yearn for the mines” meme jokes that child labor laws got kids out of dangerous physical mines, only for them to happily pick up virtual pickaxes in Minecraft. The game can auto-generate a world for them, but the fun is in building it themselves and expressing their creativity. So when AI generates the code, how do we keep that same connection to the systems we’re creating?
In this talk, we’ll explore ways to maintain cognitive ownership of systems built with agents, using examples like Simon Willison’s Agentic Engineering Patterns, Addy Osmani’s agent skills, and GitHub’s Awesome Copilot, where developers build and test context like code. We’ll also use Andrej Karpathy’s distinction between loving coding and building to examine why some enjoy this shift while others feel reduced to “looks good to me” merchants. You’ll leave with resources for understanding AI-generated code and reassurance that you’re not alone in seeking a way back to craftsmanship. A way back to the mines.
Slides: https://segunakinyemi.com/slides/the-children-yearn-for-the-mines/
Format: 30-45 minute talk for software engineers and anyone building with AI coding tools.
Agentic AI: From Acronyms to Applications
With the rise of Agentic AI, Uncle Ben’s “with great power comes great responsibility” warning has never felt more relevant. AI agents can gather information, use tools, make decisions, and take action with limited human direction. Everybody’s talking about them, but ask 10 people what an agent is and you’ll get 10 different answers. So what actually makes a system agentic, how is it different from Generative AI, and where does human responsibility still lie?
In this session, we’ll cut through the hype by looking at how AI agents are being used in the real world, and what happens when they go wrong. Through interactive scenarios where an agent is given a goal, a prompt, and access to tools, we’ll unpack why a seemingly good result still went sideways. Along the way, we’ll talk candidly about AI costs, layoffs, hiring trends, and the future of work.
By the end, you’ll understand LLMs, RAG, MCP, RLHF, context, and context windows through practical examples. You’ll see what Agentic AI can do, where it falls short, and why the growing field of AI Engineering still needs humans in the loop.
Slides: https://segunakinyemi.com/slides/agentic-ai-technical-audience/
Format: 45-60 minute talk (no laptops) or workshop (laptops required) for technical and non-technical audiences, from college students to working professionals
How to Train Your AI: Demystifying ChatGPT With Machine Learning Basics
ChatGPT can feel like magic, but underneath it all, it’s making highly educated guesses based on patterns. This AI Literacy session takes an intentionally oversimplified dive into machine learning, neural networks, and deep learning by turning you into the computer.
You’ll write traditional programming rules for recognizing a cat, learn to recognize an unfamiliar writing system from examples, and guess missing words in sentences. Along the way, you’ll get an approachable understanding of supervised learning, self-supervised learning, and how large language models (LLMs) learn by guessing, checking, and adjusting across enormous amounts of text.
By the end, you’ll understand how examples become patterns, how patterns become predictions, and what makes training AI models so expensive. The result may seem intelligent, but it’s fundamentally pattern recognition at scale and still requires humans in the loop.
Slides: https://segunakinyemi.com/slides/how-to-train-your-ai-language-activity/
Format: 45-60 minute talk (no laptops) or workshop (laptops required) for technical and non-technical audiences, from high school students to working professionals
AI Technical Interview Workshop
AI-assisted software development is everywhere now. Companies like Canva, Meta, and Google let candidates use AI in coding interviews, and teams at Anthropic are dropping data structures and algorithms questions altogether. So if AI writes the code, what are interviewers actually evaluating, and how do you prove you can do the job?
In this workshop, you’ll step into a realistic AI-assisted interview environment where an AI agent has already written the code. Across a series of challenges, you’re given code that compiles and looks right, but has a logical disconnect between the problem requirements and what the agent actually built. You can use a built-in AI assistant to ask questions and make changes, with every prompt and response visible to the interviewer.
To succeed, you have to read the requirements, understand what the code is doing, spot where the agent’s logic went wrong, and guide the AI to fix it. AI can write code, but it can’t do your job. Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work.
Slides: https://segunakinyemi.com/slides/ai-technical-interview-workshop/
Format: 60 minute workshop (laptops required) for college students studying computer science or related majors.
We're Not Cooked: Your Tech Career Survival Guide in the Age of AI
There’s never been a scarier time to be a computer science student, with tech CEOs fearmongering that AI will replace all white-collar jobs or that software engineers will be replaced in months, even as their own companies aggressively hire them and walk back their job apocalypse prophecies. So how do you get a tech job now that AI can write code, and is a computer science degree still worth it? I mean…chat, are we cooked? Not at all!
In this talk, we’ll start with a quick history of AI and a live next-token prediction exercise to see how LLMs work under the hood. From there, we’ll examine why writing code was never the real bottleneck in software engineering, and follow the money through GPUs, data centers, and layoffs. We’ll cut through AI washing to see why companies are cutting costs to pay for ridiculously expensive compute, and why some employers are already rehiring the workers they thought AI could replace.
You’ll also meet AI Engineering, the fastest-growing job on LinkedIn, and see why it’s much more accessible than Machine Learning. We’ll cover the AI terms you should know, which technical skills and certifications still matter, how AI resume screeners and interviews work, and what a resume that landed a Microsoft software engineering internship looks like. Coding manually is dead, but the judgment, systems thinking, and accountability of software engineering are becoming more valuable, not less. Times might be changing, but we aren’t cooked. Far from it.
Slides: https://segunakinyemi.com/slides/were-not-cooked/
Format: 45-60 minute talk for college students studying computer science or related majors.
Precision Meets Creativity with Microsoft Designer
AI can generate an image in seconds, but creativity still belongs to the human behind the prompt. In this workshop, you’ll start by matching an AI-generated image to two possible prompts, one vague and one detailed, to see how specificity, clarity, and creativity shape the result. Then you’ll use structured, fill-in-the-blank prompts to create your own visuals with Microsoft Designer, leaving with something you conceived and directed, and a clear understanding that AI supports human creativity rather than replacing it.
Slides: https://segunakinyemi.com/slides/precision-meets-creativity-with-microsoft-designer/
Format: 60 minute workshop (laptops required) for middle and high school students of all backgrounds.
Context Engineering Is Software Engineering
Codex or Claude Code. Cursor or GitHub Copilot. Terminal or IDE. If you’re wondering which of these gives you the best outputs in AI-assisted coding, the answer is all of them, or none of them. Maybe you fancy Google’s Antigravity instead, or the desktop app versions of any of the above. It hardly matters which you use, because your coding agent is only as good as the context you engineer around it.
In this talk we’ll define what context engineering is, how it works, what makes it portable across harnesses and models, and why it’s as important as the code itself. The cool kids are all saying context is the new code, and they’re right, which is why it deserves the same rigor we’ve always given the code. We’ll cover terms like prompt, harness, loop, and graph engineering, and why your context needs tests, just like your code.
By the end, you’ll understand your options for durable context, including custom instructions, custom agents, agent skills, agent hooks, agent plugins, and MCP servers. And you’ll see why context engineering, at its core, is software engineering, with a desperate need for humans in the loop. You might not need to read the code anymore, but you really do need to read the context.
Slides: https://segunakinyemi.com/slides/context-engineering-is-software-engineering/
Format: 45-60 minute talk for software engineers and anyone building with AI coding tools.
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